Melike Taşçıoğlu Vaughan was born in Ankara in 1979. Lives and works in Eskişehir.
We invented the word kipography by merging the Greek word kipos (garden) with grafi (writing, drawing, recording). Our intention was to find a word similar to hieroglyph in both meaning and sound, for what was until then simply called the ‘garden project’.
This project regards what we did on our garden wall and why; the need to renovate the 10 square meter garden of the house we moved in together grew beyond an ordinary garden project. We renewed the soil and planted flowers, paved flat stones and painted the walls but then noticed our spiritual need for something beyond the botanical knowledge for the flowers to bloom and plants to spring up.
In a world where Google searches and Youtube videos answer every question, we decided to dismiss the ready-made answers and the attitude preventing experimentation, and to think with nature: with plants and animals. Instead of settling for fertilizing the soil or cultivating seasonally, we took action to create special talismans; instead of trusting calculations
and trial and error approaches, we decided to trust our intuition.
A simple border painting idea expanded with the question, “what does the garden need?” Symbols of ancient civilizations, motifs from
our carpets and rugs, and artistic traces we collected in our minds, consciously or unconsciously, allowed a visual communication effort
to blossom. This time, it was not with other people but towards invisible forces of nature.
From their inception, the kipographs, borne out of many discussions and sketches, became prayers and talismans inviting nature to collaborate. We depicted a semi-abstract, semi-figurative alphabet on our ‘cave’ wall with an intention to manifest our aims.
The garden project allowed us to realize our motive of bringing the magical power of art into our daily lives, as we put aside the information and data that mechanize us. While painting the simplistic designs on the wall, we had the chance to return to the most primordial ground, the essence and the most magical state of aesthetic need, visual communication and leaving one’s mark at a place. Therein, we had the opportunity to once more ask and answer questions dating back thousands of years.
