Weaving Protection: Where Heritage Streams Meet

I've been drawing evil eyes on paper I stained dark blue with elderberry ink, and something profound is happening in that convergence.

It started with feeling disconnected from my Turkish Cypriot heritage. Moving from multicultural London to the predominantly white rural Midlands meant leaving behind more than just geography. I was no longer surrounded by the smells of my grandmother's cooking, the sound of her speaking Turkish to my mother, the casual presence of a culture that had always been part of the fabric of daily life. Those blue glass evil eyes in my grandmother's hallway weren't just decorations - they were guardians, meant to absorb and deflect negative energy. When I began drawing mandalas incorporating these protective symbols, it felt like finding a language I'd forgotten I knew how to speak.

But the more I've moved toward natural materials - away from the plastic-wrapped convenience that felt so soulless - the more these practices have begun to weave together in ways I never expected.

Elder trees were planted in English hedgerows as protection, guardian trees around homes to ward off evil spirits and negative energies. According to Celtic tradition, the elder is my birth tree - I was born on 17th October, placing me under its guardianship. Now I'm using the berries from these same protective trees to create the protective symbols of my grandmother's culture. Turkish evil eyes made with English elder ink - both rooted in the same ancient understanding that certain things can shield us from harm.

The process itself feels like protection. Instead of clicking 'add to cart' for ready-made blue paper, I'm staining white paper with elderberry juice, adding vinegar to deepen the colour, watching it transform. My hands know this work. Something in my body recognises this as right - the slow alchemy of making what I need rather than buying what's available.

The contrast is striking. My earlier evil eye mandalas were drawn on shop-bought paper with shop-bought gel pens - quick, convenient, predictable. But something feels different now, more intentional. I'm still using white and pale blue gel pens to draw on top of the elderberry-stained paper, but they don't flow properly on the natural surface. The ink resists the artificial materials, as if they don't quite belong together.

This friction is teaching me something. Maybe I need to make the light colours too - perhaps paints from chalk, though I'm not sure yet how the Turks originally created these protective blues and whites. There's research to be done, experiments to try. The practice is calling me deeper into itself, asking me to understand not just the symbols but the very substances that bring them to life.

There's something profound about working with materials that were chosen for their protective qualities by ancestors I'll never know. The English countryside speaking to my Turkish grandmother's wisdom, finding the common thread that runs through both cultures - the understanding that we need boundaries, shields, ways to deflect what would drain us.

The elderberry ink becomes a bridge between the grandmother who hung evil eyes and the ancestors who planted elder hedges. Different cultures, same human need for protection, for rootedness, for practices that connect us to something larger than ourselves.

When the glass evil eye breaks, we know it's done its work - absorbed all the negativity it can hold. But these paper ones, made with protective plant inks, feel different. They're not meant to break. They're meant to dissolve back into the earth when their time is done, carrying whatever they've absorbed back to the soil that feeds the next generation of guardian trees.

My art practice is becoming a conversation between heritages I thought were separate. Between the modern world's convenience and ancient ways of making. Between protection as something you buy and protection as something you create with your own hands, using materials that have been keeping people safe for centuries.

The mandala is a boundary drawn in elderberry and intention. Each curve a quiet rebellion against disconnection - from heritage, from the earth, from the knowledge that lives in our hands when we remember to trust it.

The practices are evolving naturally, finding their own way toward something that feels more authentic, more rooted. The evil eye made with elder ink isn't just art - it's ancestral streams meeting in my hands, protection layered upon protection, old wisdom speaking through new creation.

This is what it feels like to come home to yourself - not through one heritage or another, but through the place where they meet, where protection grows from the ground up.