Reflective Gardens

The designer Sema Topaloglu in the “Reflective Gardens” installation proposes a garden of glass and lighting for reflection. She has designed and created a series of lighting fixtures in glass and brass that both emit and reflect light. In this way these lights as plants create a manmade “bioluminescence”. These plant lights are arranged in a grassy field inspired by the natural topography of Bodrum designed. Topaloglu’s plant lights, suggest a new type of “Refective Gardens” as a synthesis of art and design for urban settings. “Reflective Gardens” is an installation that explores, reflection as thought and reflection as light, but more so creates a new setting for nature in urban contemporary life today. The gestural forms of Topaloglu’s lights in handmade glass are as unique as the flowers of nature suggesting a hybrid of nature and craft of which Topaloglu has been a master of for the last 20 years. Visitors can walk and interact in this “Reflective Gardens” - an organic realm – at once full of new motifs carved in glass – that becomes a natural biophilic formal garden. As in Topaloglu’s previous works the forms are organic yet studied, decorative but decidedly raw. An ornamental function has been replaced by an abstract form in lighting with its own rigid materiality and new notion of organicism in light.

Sema Topaloglu is renowned for her dedication to materials, craftsmanship, and a distinctive aesthetic vision, emphasizing tactile and visual relationships in her residential, retail, and leisure interiors. Over recent years, her focus has been on applying a highly personal design approach to every aspect, from the smallest detail to the overall concept. The studio's uniqueness lies in blending Topaloglu's design idioms with handcrafted execution by skilled artisans within the Sema Topaloglu Studio team.