Gözde Ilkin

Gözde İlkin adopts domestic fabrics as a carrier of culture, geography, and traditions. She collects second-hand and used fabrics from the places she visits and people she meets. The history endured by the fabric is kept away from the artist’s intrusion by preserving its previous memory, such as its existing embroidery and used areas.

She creates motifs in her fabrics with forms representing today’s memory that consist of social processes, urban transformation, power politics, gender roles, soil, and the memory of nature. The fabrics that embrace the memory of humans and nature together are marked by the stains/traces of plants, representing nature’s motifs and organic processes. She refers to human nature and cultural processes with fluid motifs that alternate between plant, water, soil, and human and animal.

The works titled, Liberated Roots, Kingdom, and Escape Dance, are produced between 2016 and 2021 and consist of forms inspired by rituals that remind people of their relationship with nature and the knowledge of the land that people forgot.