Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis

Thesis: A Fountain of Threads: The Artist as Vessel

July 2025

Abstract

This thesis explores the artist as a transindividual vessel—neither an isolated genius nor passive container, but a conduit shaped by atmospheric, genealogical, and affective entanglements. Through two interconnected projects, Mythocondria and In Her Sources, the research weaves feminist philosophy, Indigenous cosmologies, and eco-poetic methods to reimagine identity as a relational and transformative process.

Mythocondria, rooted in storytelling and textile practices across Turkish, Kurdish, and Syrian communities, creates a living net of matrilineal memory. Incorporating the artist’s grandmother’s dementia and extending toward infertile pistachio trees, the project explores intergenerational and interspecies memory. Drawing from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory,” Julia Kristeva’s “khora,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” theory, the cocoon becomes both method and metaphor—where memory, body, and myth entangle beyond authorship.

In Her Sources continues this inquiry through rivers, breath, and elemental rituals. Using glassblowing and water collection from the Seyhan River, the project critiques essentialist notions of origin and instead proposes a fountain of multiplicity. Engaging Astrida Neimanis’s bodies of water, David Abram’s mnemonic landscapes, and Bayo Akomolafe’s theory of cracks, the work traces hidden archives stored in atmospheres and fluids.

This thesis positions vesselhood as an active, porous mode of becoming. It resists Western logics of mastery, offering instead a fluid practice of attunement, rupture, and co-becoming. Through transindividual memory, myth, and sonic resonance, it envisions the invisible not as lack, but as the fertile ground of collective presence.

Author: Öykü Özgencil