Human,
Approximate
Objects of Uncertain Comfort, 2026
There is only so much a porcelain figure can do to keep her life together. She can dress beautifully, maintain a pleasant expression and stand very still. Beyond that, she must rely on a rather questionable support system.
These works bring ornamental figures into arrangements of stone, folded forms, soft furnishings and objects that seem to have arrived without an invitation. A poised woman negotiates her balance. A reclining gentleman disappears into his own comfort. Everyone is making an effort, although the effort is unevenly distributed.
Made to embody grace, leisure and good taste, decorative figures have little room for an inner life. Their expressions are fixed. Their costumes are permanent. Even their happiness belongs to whoever owns them. Here, their carefully composed identities become entangled with things they cannot quite control. Elegance requires assistance. Comfort becomes engulfing. The distinction between being supported and being trapped grows surprisingly difficult to maintain.
The humour comes from recognising how familiar this is. We, too, arrange things around ourselves and hope the arrangement will hold: possessions, relationships, small routines, convincing shoes. We inherit ideas about what a life should look like, then spend years trying to fit inside them.
There is tenderness in these awkward constructions. Something can be ridiculous and still deserve care. Perhaps dignity is what survives when looking dignified is no longer an option.
The Soft Thing Took My Name, 2026
This exhibition is a farewell to a subject that has lived inside me for too long: being a daughter, becoming a mother, and the strange, soft violence of being shaped by both.
I write this as an artist, as someone trained in psychology, and as a woman who has spent much of her life trying to understand the emotional architecture of her own past. For many years, I have returned to the same questions: Where did this feeling of outsiderness begin? Why did I feel like an alien in my own family? Why did love feel so inconsistent, so conditional, so difficult to trust?
(Immigration later gave this alienness a landscape, a language, a legal form. It made the feeling visible in the world. But it did not begin there. It started much earlier, inside the family, in the place where belonging was first promised and first broken.)
As a child, I often imagined that I had been born into the wrong home. I believed in aliens. I believed they might be my real parents, somewhere else, somewhere kinder, waiting to take me back to my true origin. It was a fantasy, but also a survival mechanism: a way to explain the feeling that the world I had been promised was not the world I was given.
The figures in this exhibition are mothers, daughters, children, aliens, shelters and ruins. They are soft but not innocent. Their bodies are stitched, torn, inflated, leaking and repaired. They carry care, but also the exhaustion of too much care. They are fragile and overgrown, dry and still alive, falling apart and reforming again.
The work comes from the scream of a daughter who did not feel seen, and from the body of a mother who sees too much. I am both: the child waiting to be rescued, and the mother trying to hold everything together.
After years of returning to the same emotional ground, I feel ready to leave this material behind. Not because it is healed, but because I no longer want it to be the centre of my language.
The Soft Thing Took My Name is a soft monument, a family portrait from the wrong planet, and a goodbye to the wound that made me, fed me, consumed me, and finally became form. Although this exhibition is fully created with AI, the emotional work behind it is real; through this simulation, I was able to see, hold, and finally release something I had carried for years.
And somehow, through that process, something in me was healed.
Human,
Approximate
Human, Approximate, 2025
Human, Approximate is a series of sculptural figures constructed from black garbage bags and cardboard boxes, materials associated with packing, transporting, storing, and discarding.
The works resemble bodies that have been wrapped, stacked, or left waiting in transit. Some sit, some slump, some lean against one another, their human forms visible but partially obscured. The figures appear present and physical, yet anonymous and sealed, as if their identities have been flattened into the surfaces of packaging.
These are not arbitrary materials. Garbage bags and cardboard boxes form the backdrop of ordinary working life: warehouses, back rooms, service entrances, and end-of-shift clean-ups. They belong to the infrastructure of a society that depends on certain kinds of labour while remaining largely indifferent to the people performing it. The figures do not announce their exhaustion. They simply embody it, the way a body does after years of being useful and unremarked upon.
The works occupy an uneasy space between person and object, reflecting how human lives can be repositioned within economic and political systems: valued for output, managed for efficiency, sorted through categories, and cycled through with the logic of inventory. In this way, the sculptures speak both to working-class experience and to migration, to lives shaped by labour, transit, waiting, and conditional belonging.
Their surfaces suggest replaceability, disposability, and temporary use. Their postures suggest something more enduring: vulnerability, exhaustion, and dignity. What remains visible is not identity in any fixed sense, but the trace of human presence under conditions that continually threaten to flatten it.
Human, Approximate asks what happens when a human life becomes something approximate: a statistic, a package in transit, a temporary presence awaiting approval. Suspended between visibility and disappearance, the works reflect on how fragile the category of the human can become within structures organised around storage, movement, and efficiency, and how such conditions can quietly shape a person’s psychological and emotional life.
Yakışıklı Oğlum
My Handsome Son, 2025
“Yakışıklı Oğlum” is a series that presents portraits of men placed in childish, kitschy, and gaudy picture frames. The decorative borders symbolise the way some mothers continue to view their sons: as eternally perfect, innocent, and handsome, no matter what they've done or become. The phrase “Yakışıklı Oğlum” ("My Handsome Son") is even misspelled on many of the frames, but that distortion goes unnoticed, camouflaged by the deeply distorted gaze of parental idealisation.
This project challenges a cultural narrative many of us know all too well: the myth of the untouchable golden boy. He is the pride of the household, endlessly praised for his looks, his manners, his supposed goodness. Yet behind this glorified image often hides a more troubling reality of men who ghost, cheat, manipulate, harass, and sometimes even harm. And still, they are excused, defended, forgiven because “he’s a good boy.”
Through satire and symbolism, this work exposes how dysfunction is mistaken for charm, cruelty is rebranded as charisma, and plain mediocrity is elevated to greatness under the warm filter of unconditional maternal love.
No, your son is not perfect.
No, he is not the most handsome man in the world.
And yes, he might be the problem.
The Family
The Family: An Exhibition of Estranged Lives and Unlived Dreams, 2024
In this house, everyone is creative.
Their absence was always so beautifully composed, like a still life. A hand left unfinished on a sketch, a piano half-played, a cigarette burning in silence. They were never really there, but they left behind such poetic traces, it almost felt like love.
Each room held someone immersed in their own world, memories tugging at them like old songs, dreams keeping them just distracted enough to never notice one another.
Everyone was always busy. And in all that busyness, I was quietly disappearing.
We never truly shared anything.
The house was full of deep experience, but not connection.
Each person simmered alone, eyes turned inward, their doors always closed.
And I stopped knocking. After a while, it felt pointless.
Even now, I wonder:
If they opened their doors. would they even recognise me? Know me?
We were shaped by separate hands, cast in different moulds. I learned to be small and quiet and good at vanishing.
But somehow…
somehow there’s still something holding us together.
Something invisible. Maybe it’s shared blood. Maybe it’s shared longing.
Maybe it’s the simple fact that none of us ever really got what we needed.
A tiny thread, smaller than a fly’s head—
but strong enough to pull us back to this house.
To these rooms.
To each other,
even if only in memory.
Keep the Vampires from Your Door
Keep the Vampires from Your Door, 2023
So, imagine this: the garden at dusk. Shadows are getting longer, everything's taking on that weird in-between glow, and there's this figure. Dark, almost blending into the scenery but just noticeable enough to catch your eye. It's like playing a game of hide and seek with a ghost.
You can’t help but feel a smile at your lips. The idea of a vampire in your garden—it's ridiculous, isn’t it? And yet, there's that soft hiss you think you hear when the wind rustles the leaves. A shiver that has nothing to do with the cooling night air.
There's that dark figure again, just by the ancient oak. Or was it by the rose bushes? It’s always there, lurking, teasing, but never fully showing itself. It's as if the garden itself is in on the joke, conspiring with the night to keep you on edge.
Think about the charm of it all, the way the garden has changed. It used to be so peaceful, now it’s like a stage for some dark, whimsical play. The figure is almost playful, in a sinister kind of way. You can’t help but smile, a mix of fear and humor.
"Keep the vampires from your door," you think, half-smiling at the absurdity, half-terrified. Shadows play tricks, but what if they're not tricks? In this moody, dark, quirky garden, anything seems possible. The next shadow might just come to life.
Divine Damage
Divine Damage, 2023
Divine damage, the kind that shakes your soul and leaves you reeling, is not always the work of a vengeful deity. Sometimes it's the result of an earthquake, the earth's own transformational force that tears apart the land and scatters the debris of human life.
Divine damage is the inescapable consequence of our imperfect human nature. We are flawed creatures, constantly inflicting harm on ourselves and those around us. But perhaps this damage is not without purpose. Perhaps it is necessary. Perhaps it's the only way to truly see the world for what it is, to break through the surface of our mundane existence. It's a reminder that we are not in control.
Divine damage is the trembling of a metaphorical ground that shakes the very foundation of our existence. It's the kind of transformation that can turn trash into treasure and reveals the potential in the discarded, the forgotten, the overlooked. Divine damage can be a catalyst for change, an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the world around us. It reminds us that even in the darkest of times, there is hope for transformation and renewal. Divine damage may leave us shaken and uncertain, but it also presents us with an opportunity for growth and change. We can take the broken pieces of our lives and transform them into something new, something beautiful, and something that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit.
In divine damage, the earthquake is not just a moment of destruction, but a chance to tear down old structures to make room for something new. Despite the darkness and pain it creates, there is a strange kind of beauty in it; the beauty in the brokenness. And this beauty that can only be found in the darkest corners and hidden depths of the human soul.
No Land Can Hold My Body
No Land Can Hold My Body, 2021
Canbora Bayraktar & Yeliz Yorulmaz
No Land Can Hold My Body marries imagery that evokes a make-believe space travel, with culturally loaded landscapes and symbols. This project is a refinement of our deep-seated emotional states, experiences and moods in Australia over a decade. We set off on our wanderings in pursuit of our desire to find a place we call home. This alternate home is an imaginary land that is the mélange of our playful dreams and memories, and disappointment in their knock-off. The installation humorously suggests both fantasies of escape (dreaming about finding a 'home' on another planet) and possible realities of fantasies (knowing that if we find it, it will be another 'not-home'). The analogy of a stillborn space exploration is visually defined through a spaceship destined to fall and a fallen meteorite weirdly familiarised by some ordinary household objects.
Thinks About Thinking, Not Thinking and Non-Thinking
Thinks About Thinking, Not Thinking and Non-Thinking, 2021
Audrey Newton & Yeliz Yorulmaz
Audrey Newton and Yeliz Yorulmaz’s installation explores the elusive, ungraspable ideas that artists sometimes find impossible to fully realise. Inspired by Franz Kafka's enigmatic creature, The Odradek, from The Cares of a Family Man, this installation brings forth a metaphor for those persistent yet unmanifested visions. Like Kafka’s peculiar, star-shaped spool with loose, hanging threads, the Odradek embodies an anthropomorphic, unsettling presence that echoes the artists’ own encounters with ideas that resist definition yet linger in their minds.