My name is Nedim Celkan.
My life belongs to the sea. I am not only someone who eats fish, but someone who knows them, respects them, and listens to them. I wanted fish to have an art of their own. I have been diving for sixty years; I know the darkness, the light, the scent and the silence of the deep. Every creature that rises from the water speaks first to my curiosity, then to my imagination. Each fish carries a story, and through my art, I let those stories speak.”
My early years were spent painting cinema posters, working as a print-house illustrator, and drawing comic books. Those years taught me discipline, composition, and the art of creating character. Yet eventually, painting became insufficient. I felt a wall, a limit. The worlds drawn by my hand began to feel too narrow.
And at that very moment, the sea called me.
Whatever emerged from the water, I treated it as part of life itself.
Fish skins, wings, scales; crab arms; sea urchin shells; the texture of the octopus… I preserved each of them with special treatments, dried them for years, sometimes decades. Some materials required ten years of waiting; others twenty.
This is an art of patience. An art of devotion.
A single work may take months — or it may demand a lifetime.
Nothing you see in my works is accidental.
The sky may be the underside of a sole fish,
armour becomes moray skin,
a garment becomes the wing of a flying gurnard,
and the arm of a warrior may well come from a crab.
Mythology has always been close to me.
The daughters of Poseidon, Roman soldiers, Sioux warriors, Egyptian figures, fish–human hybrids…
They are the children of my imagination.
Beneath the waves, the silence always opened a doorway to another time.
I was the first to create this artistic language.
This is not a boast, but an observation. I know of no other artist who has worked with marine life on such a scale, with such discipline, and through purely organic materials. I wish there had been others — so that I might have learned from them as well. But this path opened itself only to me.
I never sold any of my works.
This is not an art made for money.
I kept every piece, protected them for years, because each of them was entrusted to me by the sea.
Toward the end of my life, I had only one wish:
That these works be seen around the world, recognised for what they are, and inspire others to dive into the sea and create new artistic languages of their own.
I can no longer dive, but my works still do.
They will continue to tell the stories that rise from the water.