Gözde Ilkin

Gözde İlkin creates her work on fabric, canvas, paper, and found objects. She embroiders her stories, either by hand or machine, on these surfaces with black and white or colored thread. She works with accumulated images, stories, photographs, objects and clothes that help describe particular situations, while new spaces and new dialogues bare the potential for new stories. 

At first glance, her figures appear as men and women, amorphous bodies attached to one another mostly at the head, stomach, or occasionally limbs. These bodies create an atmosphere for the surface on which they find themselves and look for an identity via the texture of the fabric. Emancipated from their social and sexual identities, these characters are transformed in İlkin’s work like the children of a lost planet. They resist their pre-conditioned lives. 

Through interventions in the texture on which she works, İlkin completes her work with strings left un-sewn or a single layer of acrylic paint. She sometimes borders these body-geographies with stitches on the texture of the embroidery fabric. The act of sewing, on the other hand, transforms the fabric itself. 

Gözde İlkin was born in Kütahya, Turkey in 1981. She studied painting at the Fine Arts Faculty of Mimar Sinan University and got her master’s degree at Marmara University in Istanbul. She has taken part in international artist exchange programs in the Netherlands and Germany and in exhibitions in several centers, including Stockholm, Rotterdam, New York, Berlin, Paris, Munich and Belgrade. In Turkey, her works have been displayed in many venues, such as Istanbul Modern Museum, Siemens Sanat, Hafriyat, Karşı Sanat, and Tobacco Warehouse. She was a member of the artist initiative- Atılkunst- between 2006-2013. Gözde İlkin lives and works in Istanbul.