Looking In Looking Out

This series of works began by chance! I came across Joan Didion’s The Year of
Magical Thinking at a bookstore, and her sharp way of observing the world
immediately spoke to me. Around the same time, I watched a video of
Parvaneh Etemadi, an Iranian artist, and began thinking about women writers
and artists, and how inspiring they are in finding their own voices. A visit to
Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul also left me struck by the
power of storytelling: how imagination and real life blur together, creating a
world both intimate and universal.
These encounters became the starting point for my paintings. They taught me
that observing is an act of transformation, and telling a story can be a way of self
discovery. I began to look more carefully at the world around me, collecting
fragments and memories, and piecing them together as a way of asking: What
is my story? Who am I? What do I need to learn about myself? Through this
journey, I’ve also realized how much I am attached to every broken piece, every
torn fragment, and how I revive them by mending and repairing the parts of the
painting. I can’t imagine discarding the ones that seem useless!
This body of work is both an inward reflection and an outward gaze. It is an
attempt to let my mind and my world live fully within my paintings, to create
spaces where memory, imagination, and reality overlap, and where stories
continue to unfold.