I am an interdisciplinary artist whose work merges traditional art practices with scientific materials and biological mediums, such as mold spores. My projects reveal the micro-world by making invisible microorganisms visible, offering viewers a tangible encounter with the microscopic life surrounding us.

I create visual and interactive biological landscapes by exploring these hidden organisms. I collect mold spores from the air, soil, plants, trees, and even human environments, isolating them to reveal the unique microbiome of each source. These spores are incubated within synthetic yet habitable environments, allowing me to observe the interactions, struggles, and conflicts that unfold across the surface of my work.

As the mold germinates, it leaves behind physical imprints—expressing itself through color, texture, and shape on the panels that serve as a living platform. This process enables microorganisms to transition from the unseen microworld to the observable macroworld, making their presence visual and tactile. Mold spores, in turn, become dynamic, living agents of abstraction, transforming the picture surface into a constantly evolving canvas of organic expression.

Echoes of Nature
2023
Documentation of Mold spores
1:51 min
 

My recent focus has been on human impacts on nature. These impacts can be profound, ranging from environmental changes that adversely influence biodiversity to climate change. Echoes of Nature vividly portrays the harmful impact of environmental issues on the planet. I started by taking a Polaroid photo of a landscape, which served as the foundation for the project. To bring attention to the issue, I intentionally added mold spores from the exact location to the environment to slowly destroy the unique Polaroid landscape. A time-lapse video was created to show a week's destruction in just two minutes. The video also features an alarm sound, slowed down to remind us of the urgent need for action to protect our planet. Echoes of Nature is a powerful call to action, urging us to take responsibility for the environment and work towards a sustainable future.

I use live microscopic mold that leaves physical inscriptions by direct contact on the surface of a paper or board, which creates a living platform. In the Contamination Series, the surface of each panel is laced with graceful, brilliant mold until the entire surface is covered and patterned with circular borders. Then, I assembled these forms and shapes that mold produced to create various visual references for natural and human-impacted landscapes. The forms have similarities to human-induced activities on the landscape. They create territories, boundaries, and borderlines, creating conflicts on the picture surface.

"Balci gives living microbes a place to grow and organize themselves on specially prepared plates. The microorganisms, which normally are invisible to the naked eye, are made visible in these conditions. They create maps of “territories” as they battle for food sources, and their behavior is disturbingly parallel to many scenarios of human conflict. The artist organizes and assembles the landscapes or maps resulting from these natural migrations into abstract compositions limited in tonal variation but elegant in form."

by Claudia Rousseau, Gazette.net, September 18, 2013. 
 


 

"If the artistic process is more interesting than the outcome, as some modernists hold, then the greatest artist is nature itself. Its systems are endless and inexorable, even if the results aren’t always impressive to the naked eye. Take, for example, the fungal experiments of Selin Balci, one of five former Hamiltonian Artists fellows who return to the gallery in “Empirical Evidence.” The Turkey-born Marylander is exhibiting such seemingly inert items as petri dishes that contain slowly evolving mold spores. Far more dramatic is a more artist-directed piece, a five-minute fast-motion video in which molds spread across a world map. It demonstrates the power and scope of the tiniest living things."
Mark Jenkins, October 1, 2021, The Washington Post

"The map-based works present this phenomenon in stark terms, played out as geopolitical headlines ripped from the paper. The World depicts worlds run amok by war, disease or possibly famine. Faint pencil outlines suggest physical boundaries that the organisms push to the brink. Teaming and frothing, they have no “place” to go, and so they turn on one another in a game of brinkmanship, drawing boundaries with battlegrounds to gain the upper hand. The pieces are both eerie and transfixing, haunting yet mesmerizing, and their underlying message could be ignored offhand, if not because we see similar battles taking place today in regions as remote as Syria and as near as Dallas." Eric Hope for East City Art, 2014.