A New Studio, A New Set of Variables
In 2023, I moved into a new studio in Antalya and found myself facing something familiar: having to learn my materials all over again.
The supplies available to me were different. Their chemical properties were different. Techniques that had worked before did not always produce the same result.
At first, this felt like a practical problem.
But experimentation has a way of changing the questions we ask.
When a familiar process stops working, there are two possibilities: try to reproduce what worked before, or become curious about what the new conditions might make possible.
I chose the second.
There were unsuccessful tests, unexpected reactions and combinations that led nowhere. But there were also results I would never have discovered if everything had behaved exactly as expected.
It reinforced something that has remained important in my practice ever since:
I do not want materials to function only as tools for executing an idea I have already decided upon.
I want the process to be capable of changing the idea itself.
Sometimes uncertainty is not an obstacle in the work. It is where the work begins.REMAINS began with a question that became increasingly difficult for me to ignore:
How much of who we are is actually our own?
From the beginning of our lives, we absorb expectations. From family, culture, society, relationships. Ideas about who we should become, what we should value, what success should look like, even what we should want.
Over time, these expectations can become so familiar that we stop recognising them as external. They become part of the way we understand ourselves.
REMAINS explores the moment when that certainty begins to shift.
The works bring together fluid and rigid forms, movement and restraint, surfaces that expand and structures that contain them. I am interested in the tension between these opposing states rather than in resolving it.
Because separating ourselves from what has shaped us is rarely simple. Some things are imposed. Some are inherited. Some become genuinely ours.
The series does not attempt to define an authentic self or suggest that everything external should be removed.
Instead, it asks a quieter and more difficult question:
When everything we have learned to be is stripped back, what remains?
The supplies available to me were different. Their chemical properties were different. Techniques that had worked before did not always produce the same result.
At first, this felt like a practical problem.
But experimentation has a way of changing the questions we ask.
When a familiar process stops working, there are two possibilities: try to reproduce what worked before, or become curious about what the new conditions might make possible.
I chose the second.
There were unsuccessful tests, unexpected reactions and combinations that led nowhere. But there were also results I would never have discovered if everything had behaved exactly as expected.
It reinforced something that has remained important in my practice ever since:
I do not want materials to function only as tools for executing an idea I have already decided upon.
I want the process to be capable of changing the idea itself.
Sometimes uncertainty is not an obstacle in the work. It is where the work begins.REMAINS began with a question that became increasingly difficult for me to ignore:
How much of who we are is actually our own?
From the beginning of our lives, we absorb expectations. From family, culture, society, relationships. Ideas about who we should become, what we should value, what success should look like, even what we should want.
Over time, these expectations can become so familiar that we stop recognising them as external. They become part of the way we understand ourselves.
REMAINS explores the moment when that certainty begins to shift.
The works bring together fluid and rigid forms, movement and restraint, surfaces that expand and structures that contain them. I am interested in the tension between these opposing states rather than in resolving it.
Because separating ourselves from what has shaped us is rarely simple. Some things are imposed. Some are inherited. Some become genuinely ours.
The series does not attempt to define an authentic self or suggest that everything external should be removed.
Instead, it asks a quieter and more difficult question:
When everything we have learned to be is stripped back, what remains?
22.10.2026
