"Her mother had a habit, in Siesbye's childhood, of giving away her daughter's toys to other children; as an adult, Siesbye started to treat herself to gifts. On that trip, she came home one afternoon to find that the leopard was gone: her mother had gifted it to the young daughter of family friends. Later, visiting these friends, Siesbye told the little girl that she would like the toy back when the child was done playing with it."
"On our first meeting, in her home and studio in Paris's Fourteenth Arrondissement this September, Siesbye, who is eighty-seven, told me that one's life begins at forty. "All children smell of pee before they are thirty," she said. "Then you set up your work between thirty and thirty-five. Whether you are an umbrella-maker or a florist. A garden takes time to grow.""
"It may seem that, by forty, Siesbye had lived a full life by most standards. She was born in Istanbul, in 1938, to an intellectual, cosmopolitan family. Her mother's family were district governors in present-day Azerbaijan, and fled to Istanbul during the Bolshevik takeover. Her father, Ziyad Ebüzziya, was a politician, journalist, and art collector, and the grandson of Ebüzziya Mehmed Tevfik, a publisher, polymath, and key figure in the reformist Young Ottomans movement."
Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye developed a disciplined ceramic practice focused on a single stoneware bowl form, exploring variations across thousands of repetitions to distill the shape to its essence as a container of space. She began treating herself to small gifts in adulthood, exemplified by purchasing a stuffed leopard at age forty. She believes one's life begins at forty and frames artistic work as being set up between thirty and thirty-five, comparing patient development to a garden. She was born in Istanbul in 1938 to a cosmopolitan, intellectual family with roots in Azerbaijan and a legacy in politics and publishing.
Read at The New Yorker
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