My practice is a constellation of attempts to confront, contemplate, overcome, ignore, perhaps even accept death anxiety. Right before starting my degree, my mother was diagnosed with a lung tumor and endured a painful lobectomy. My perception of time was forever distorted: compacted, stretched, ripped. My previous career as a medical writer exacerbated my anxiety: I was all too aware of survival rates and the fragility of life.
To engage with these anxieties, I work with – repeatedly, almost masticating – artifactual objects and images that snag my intuition in some way. An old-fashioned kuvöz and distorted hips from visit to Hägströmer library might remind me of the viscerality of birth. A diagram from a vintage Turkish embroidery book might show up in a painting and resemble the Kaplan-Meier survival curves for lung cancer that might later formally inspire an installation. Photographs from a yellowing 1980s French guidebook for Ephesus might sublimate into paintings, creating alternate belief/relief systems, relics, to turn to for guidance.
I use meditative processes and take solace from early alchemists and psychoanalysts who believe material and psychic transformation go hand in hand. As the material changes, like when madder root seeps into the thin fibers of the namazlık tülbent (Islamic prayer cloth) and the steel rusts, decays/transforms, or the assembled images of goddesses and medical objects and embroidery illustrations are re-worked and re-emerge, brushstroke by brushstroke, I too change, because, as Bernard Stiegler asserts, the “who is nothing without the what, and conversely.”
In these processes and materials, I find brief moments of respite and presence. I remember, even if for a second, I am just one node in an infinitely complex cosmic web. I hope others who engage with my work can find such a pause as well.
Images:
01. Transaction at Ephesus (2025) Oil on canvas, 60 x 60,5 cm.
02. Kuvöz (2025) Oil on canvas, 49 x 50 cm.
03. Scream (2025) Oil on canvas, 38 x 30 cm.
