The Wood Sculptors Workshop or A Story in Six Chapters started as an artistic research project about an old, forgotten workshop in a small rural town in Sweden. Opening its doors in 1908, the workshop lasted almost a century and the site has remained untouched since then. The main income for the craftspeople came from providing handmade decorations of wood for the furniture factories in the town of Tranås. Through the years the place also became a local hub for people who were interested in all kinds of creative production. Today the old workshop, which in principle is open to public, is almost unknown to the local inhabitants. People who have heard about it are unsure of its whereabouts and the local municipality does not have the resources to keep it open. It is considered too small to function as a museum, something which is had helped prefers it in its present untouched state. What first started as an artistic journey for the artist eventually turned into a public artwork, an archive and a website. The project investigates how communities deal with cultural heritage and what different approaches, methods and disciplines can one utilize to visualize its history and make it available to a new audience and to access its histories. The paper will be an inquiry on the possibilities of utilizing artistic methodologies in the interpretation and explication of cultural heritage.
Seher Uysal (b.1983) is a visual artist and researcher based in Istanbul. Inquiries into the everyday often shape her artistic practice and her works are primarily artistic research based reflections on spatial, historical or cultural conditions. She is interested in the exploration of manifold perspectives and understandings of phenomenon, social memory, fact and fiction and specifically how people deal with the weight and expectations of cultural heritage. These explorations focus on storytelling and narration in relation to common hearsay, often misunderstood or disputed. Her practice avoids nostalgia but rather focuses on the shifting meaning of cultural heritage, what places come to represent, tangible and intangible.
Apart from the production of Art works Uysal’s practice includes developing and curating site specific exhibition projects, writing academic texts, and participating in discourses on Turkish Art education and alternative teaching practices. In 2014 she recieved a Ph.D in Fine Art from Kocaeli University where she also worked as a lecturer in 2012 & 2013. She is also one of the initiators of the project Exchanges in Art Education which organizes talks and seminars and collects Turkish and international perspectives on Artistic educational practices. Seher Uysal has presented her work at such places as the Kare Art Gallery, Istanbul, Botkyrka, Stockholm and the Pitzer College Art Galleries in Los Angeles.