Artist Statements

I see the world as layered, not just made of physical spaces, but shaped by cultural meanings, emotions, and memories. While we often talk about the built or natural environment in terms of structure or form, these spaces are never neutral. They carry stories, histories, and personal significance. Every place we encounter holds traces of culture and memory, and these layers influence how we feel, how we behave, and how we remember.

In my work, I explore these layers from a personal perspective. I draw on lived experience, emotion, and observation. I am not offering psychological analysis, but rather expressing the complexity of our relationship with space. A location can trigger a feeling, a memory, or even a whole period of life.

Theory sometimes guides me, but I always begin with what I notice in daily life. My aim is not to explain but to reveal, to make visible what often stays hidden beneath the surface. Much of my work deals with tension: between the personal and political, the visible and the hidden, the built and the broken. I respond to current events, but not always directly. A news story, a collapsing building, or a silence in a crowded room may become a starting point. Triggers matter not because they must be explained, but because they demand presence.

Art, for me, is not separate from life. It is a way of thinking, of holding contradiction and emotion. It is not about resolution but staying with the feeling, the space, the memory, and letting something emerge from it. I usually begin with something felt: a discomfort, a curiosity, an observation. It might come from a book, a conversation, a headline, or a personal experience. Some works grow out of urgency; others, from quiet reflection.

My process often begins with sketching. I use early drawings to understand the textures, colours, and forms that best express what I feel. A piece may become a painting, a sculpture, or something in between—the medium depends on the need of the idea. In my City on Fire series, the rawness required sculpture as much as paintings. In Cityscapes, I work from memory and architectural thinking. In the Name of Body emerged more from reflection and social awareness.

As an experimental artist, I move between acrylics on canvas, paper, and wood; sculptural canvases; and found objects. Sometimes I combine media or break formal expectations. My visual language shifts because life and emotion are never one-dimensional.

Even before I considered myself an artist, I created. Drawing and making were ways to release emotion, not for exhibition but for understanding. That need still drives my work. Strong feelings may not come with words—they come as shapes, colours, or materials I need to touch. I now work more intentionally, but the impulse remains.

Right now, I return often to the City on Fire series. It wasn’t planned; it emerged from a constant state of alarm in response to war, displacement, climate collapse, and eroding rights. Art helps me process the tension of a world that feels like it’s burning.

Alongside it, In the Name of Body explores how our physical selves carry fear, change, and memory. The body is our first home, a site of both vulnerability and strength. In a world shaped by control, surveillance, and resistance, this series asks how we evolve through crisis and survival. It tries to hold space for that transformation.

Art, for me, is a response: a necessity. It is how I live in the world and how I make sense of it.

City on Fire, as a series, is about how I process the world we live in today – a world full of wars, natural disasters, and violence against people, bodies and their rights. It initially began with one piece, which was sparked by the earthquake in Turkey in 2023 that struck not just me deeply, but a whole nation. Then, it slowly became a visual record of our time. Each piece is a reflection of either a feeling, a reaction or a scar.

Being a record, the series includes my sketches, paintings and sculptures. I reflect on what I sense – I see how cities burn, fall apart, how damage leaves marks on all of us. As we are living in it globally, I believe it is hard to separate ourselves from what is happening. I feel and process it through these works, and I try to give form to the weight of this collective experience.

The medium I use depends on what the moment asks of me, be it a painting, sculpture, mixed media, but undoubtedly always with an urgency to say something. I have no intention of explaining, but I have the means to hold space for what I feel when the world seems as if it is on fire.

My colour palette in this series itself became part of the message, as in flames, ashes and ruins. I use tones of red, burnt orange, black and grey to express the mood and what I see and feel in the world: cities burning, rights being stripped away, bodies and lives reduced to debris. While the series is evolving with the world around me, some works are paintings, some sketches, some sculptures, such as Pain All Around, which embodies the emotional and physical toll on women’s bodies, especially during and after natural disasters and wars, so far.

In the Name of Body is not about the body in its literal form. It is about what we carry, what we live through, and how we process our experiences, through and within ourselves. This series is shaped by personal reactions to deeply felt moments. Unlike City on Fire, which focuses on collective trauma and global events, In the Name of Body reflects the internal: our transformations, private struggles, resilience, and emotional truths.

This series does not follow a linear path. Each piece arises from a particular moment, thought, or emotional wave. Artworks may or may not be connected in style or medium, but they share a feeling or a memory regarding being a human, especially related to the times of fear, uncertainty, intimacy, or change.

The initial work that started the series is dated to the year of the pandemic, 2021, when we all sharply felt the contrast between personal isolation and public life. This first piece, Body in Crowds, came out of that tension where we were left alone and when we rediscovered the need for connection, when everything paused. It opened up a door for a new series which I believe will never be finished as it is a growing archive of fragments of lived moments, memory and presence.

Becoming is a mini-series that belongs to my larger body of work titled In the Name of the Body. Through this series, I explore the emotional intensity of transformation, especially in those moments when change is deeply personal, unpredictable, and sometimes painful. These works reflect phases of becoming: moments of rupture, resistance, and slow healing.

Materiality plays a central role in how I communicate these experiences. That’s why the entire series evolved hand in hand with the materials I used: acrylic, plaster bandage, glue, and layered textures. I chose mixed media intentionally in order to push beyond the surface and create space for complexity, messiness, and vulnerability. The physicality of the materials helps convey the weight and tenderness of emotional shifts.

Colour, too, became more than visual. It shaped mood, emotion, and atmosphere. Some pieces hold tension in their colour palette, while others feel more resolved. Each work is part of the process, as a step toward understanding how change lives in the body and memory.

The city is more than a built environment; it is a living archive of our collective and personal memories. In this series, I explore how architectural space shapes our cultural identity and emotional attachments, which we repeatedly discuss ‘place attachment’ within cities. Cities are places where we form connections, navigate belonging, and witness transformation. Each building, street, or structure holds layers of meaning that go beyond its physical form.

In Cityscapes, I work from memory rather than reference. I rely on the intuition of architectural thinking, allowing the lines, fragments, and forms to emerge as reconstructions of feeling rather than depictions of place. Each work I create within this series are the emotional and/or visual reflection of the places in my life, which I believe the audience might relate to their own experiences with space and places.

The layered surfaces, shifting perspectives, and abstracted forms in each piece mirror the way we remember cities: not as static maps, but as ever-changing impressions shaped by movement, light, sound, and memory. I am interested in architecture becoming the memory itself of who we were and what we experienced.

In this way, the city becomes a framework for understanding how we exist in time. Through these works, I attempt to reveal how architectural landscapes become personal landscapes — layered with identity, nostalgia, rupture, and resilience.