Birthday Kid

Birthday Kid was designed for the youngest resident’s 7th birthday. The first work for the house in Bodrum where Q would later follow, it grew from the idea of turning a moment of childhood into something permanent in the home’s outdoor space.

A child with one foot on the ground and the other ready to run again, one arm raised as if reaching for the world. I approached the figure not as a realistic portrait but as the essence of a movement. Birthday Kid sits close to modernism’s tradition of the stylised figure: somewhere between Matisse’s cut-outs, where the body is distilled into a single gesture, and Brâncuși’s way of simplifying form to let movement lead. The face and details were deliberately held back, leaving one continuous line that carries the energy of childhood.

The round mirror disc base continues that line. It lifts the figure slightly from the ground and, by reflecting the sky and its surroundings, creates a second, ever-changing ground beneath the sculpture, as if the child’s run carried on over light.

The making

Production began with small study figures made to settle the balance. The balance of the stance, the angle of the arm and the way the weight rests on a single foot were first tested and resolved in these studies, where the detailing was refined by hand. Once the form was settled, the work moved to the large figure.

Because the piece lives outdoors, exposed to Bodrum’s sun, salt air and seasonal shifts in temperature, a stone-textured mineral composite was chosen. The surface of the large figure was sanded layer by layer in the workshop into an uninterrupted skin that never breaks the flow of the movement, then finished to keep the stone texture of the material.

In the final stage the figure was evaluated on its mirror disc in the workshop: how the reflection completes the form, how the figure sits on its base and how it reads from different angles were each checked. The work was then installed at the house in Bodrum.