I got sick. I don’t know how I managed to catch a flu-like virus in the middle of the summer, but I did. Funny, in English you say “catch a virus” but in Turkish we say “get caught by a virus”. I don’t know who caught whom, but I had been under the weather since Tuesday.

Despite not feeling well for the majority of the week, I managed to spend ~8 hours in the studio working on my sculpture. I missed it after a two-week hiatus. To my surprise, the first time I went to the studio I found that my sculpture had grown hair. I was very puzzled until my mentor checked it and said they’re fungi. At first, I was very repelled by the sight of them but thankfully I managed to clear them off and the work is once again in good shape.

I don’t know how long it will take me to finish this thing. My mentor says it’s the perfectionism that makes the artist continue working on something past a point, but where’s that point really? I am at a level where my hands are confident enough to work with the material, I know how to shape the clay and how to properly use the tools. But my eyes are still not fully trained to see what I need to see. I work for a few hours thinking I’ve made great progress, but then my mentor finds a great number of errors in the work. It’s frustrating, yes, but I strongly believe frustration is the dominant feeling of learning something new.