Burcu Dundar Venner is a Ireland/Kildare-based visual artist, printmaker, and graphic designer.
She holds a doctoral degree, an MA, and a BA in graphic design from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. She became a full-time academic staff member at the same university in 2002, specialising in editorial design, typography, graphic design theory and history. An established academic and graphic design practitioner, she taught as an associate professor until relocating to Ireland in 2018. During her career as an academic, she led workshops, held five solo exhibitions, published articles, curated exhibitions, edited books, and designed graphic works, mainly in the cultural field.
Her first book, The Book Object, The Book as an Object, was published inTurkey in 2011. The book aims to reconsider our relationship with ‘the book’ through various interventions made to its established conventions across different periods and contexts in art and design. The Book Object, The Book as an Object, filled an untapped niche in the Turkish art and design canon and received widespread acclaim.
Since relocating to Ireland, she has shifted the focus of her practice to visual arts, primarily printmaking. Working independently as a full-time printmaker, she created prints as a member of Leinster Printmaking Studio from 2021 to 2024 and has been a full member of Graphic Studio Dublin since 2023. She joined Visual Artists Ireland as a professional member in 2024. Her works are featured in public collections, including those of the Office of Public Works (OPW) and Kildare County Council, as well as provate collections across Ireland and Europe.
ARTISTS’ STATEMENT
I shaped my artistic practice around the concept of ‘edgelands’: the interfacial interzone between urban and rural.
My inspiration is my surroundings, where I live in the rural Irish midlands. Surrounding myself with nature, I have witnessed the ongoing transformation between urban and rural interaction and the redefinition of their relationship. Different aspects of this tension, drawn from my close environment, form the subject matter of my work. In my work, I question the nature of edgelands as ‘seen, but unseen, looked at but not into’; tracing the invisible and attempting to reverse the direction of the gaze. Manipulating the elements of visual composition — space, proximity, emphasis, contrast etc. becomes a method of deconstruction and an opportunity for me to create playful tensions that mirror the layered contradictions of the edgelands themselves.
As a visual artist, I approach printmaking — particularly relief printing — as my primary medium. I treat each printmaking technique as a distinct visual language and choose processes that respond directly to the conceptual needs of each piece. Through this exploration, I use the diverse vocabularies of relief, intaglio and planographic fine art printmaking to pursue different artistic tasks.