Meet the Iraqi-American Artist Crafting Meditative Designs Inspired by Home 

On the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center, there is a constant play of light as sun bounces off the surrounding Manhattan glass towers and Hudson River. “I’ve really developed a relationship with these buildings,” says artist Maryam Turkey, whose latest creations reveal the influence of those shadows and reflections. Working out of the space as part of the Silver Art Projects residency program for the past year, the Pratt graduate, who came to the U.S. from Iraq as a refugee in 2009, has drawn connections between the countries she’s called home. The loosely architectural forms of her latest mirrors, lamps, and tables are all coated in a tactile brew of paper pulp, plaster, and resin inspired by the earth structures she grew up around in Baghdad. A trio of stools titled Oikos—“home” in Arabic—nods to the simple houses she sketched obsessively as a child. (“A square with a little square inside of it,” she muses.) Standing silhouetted against a backdrop of slick Tribeca towers, meanwhile, are models for new lamps, at this point just Styrofoam slabs held together by wooden coffee stirrers. The final versions, debuting this October in a group show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Manhattan, will incorporate brass rods as structural supports for textural shades. “They’re going to look both destroyed and also under construction,” explains Turkey, capturing a tension all too familiar to her old home and her new one. maryamturkey.com —HANNAH MARTIN