Dastar Color Study No.1 Painting

Ayse Şirin Budak (Shee-Reen) is a New York–based eco-artist originally from Istanbul, Türkiye. Şirin’s practice deeply rooted in gratitude for the natural world, sustainability, slowness, and material consciousness. Her work is rooted in the intersection of ancestral tradition and contemporary resistance. With formal training in Political Science and a minor in Art History, she approaches her practice through both a critical and historical lens. Working from her home studio, Şirin’s process is intentionally slow and grounded in tactile relationships with environmental materials. She works with earth pigments, botanical inks made from food waste, hand-dyed cotton threads and recycled handmade papers as well as locally crafted textiles specifically handwoven by women artisans. She often incorporates motifs and tribal patterns which serve as quiet symbols of cultural continuity and rootedness passed down through generations. Şirin’s work explores a unique intersection of ecofeminism, material minimalism, and quiet ritual. Her hand-stitched compositions, often dense with repetitive threadwork, are meditations on slowness, domesticity, and devotion. Her materials are not only chosen for their ecological footprint, but also for their stories—each thread, pigment, or fiber holds a history of where it came from and how it came to be. On the other hand, minimalist abstraction plays a significant role in Şirin’s visual language. Her pared-down compositions invite quiet attention and introspection. They reject the urgency and saturation of modern visual culture, favoring instead a space of pause and contemplation. In this way, her work echoes wabi-sabi aesthetics—celebrating imperfection, transience, and the beauty of the handmade. At its core, Şirin’s practice is a gesture of gratitude—for the land, for the materials, for the time to create, for the prior generations of craftmanship. It is also a quiet resistance to mass production, consumerism, and the disconnection from nature that modern life often enforces. By honoring the generational knowledge as well as what is local, ancestral, handmade, and slow, she invites viewers to reimagine our relationship to the natural world—not as something to extract from, but something to listen to, collaborate with, and ultimately, care for.