Why did you choose sculpture as a medium? Does painting influence your way of conceiving 3D objects?

Treating sculpture as a painting surface was a natural process to me. When I was mostly a painter, my paintings were getting heavier, and my sculptures were naturally occurring as I expanded the idea of brushstroke, layer, and painterly gesture. In my previous practices, I saw a blue pipe as one brushstroke or a stone as a thickly layered paint. These expressive gestures with pigments add liveness to sculptures. For example, when I paint on my nails, as I get distracted, the nail polish goes all over, not just my finger tip. Then my nail looks weirdly longer, not anymore a nail shape but a damaged form. Color can define forms. It helps shape even more 3-dimensional; it also implies narratives, nuance, and a hint. Whilst it assists the figure to be precise, it distorts the shape itself, which is also intriguing to me. Isa Genzken or Rachel Harrison have been a great inspiration to me. How the brush stroke gets volume and stretches out to space. Also, how the brush stroke can shape and manipulate forms affects my sculptures. Therefore, sculptures are fascinating because they can capture you in the moment and bring you into their surroundings with the same background and light. It manages to drag you into the world set up by the artist.

The shape, as well as the materiality of your work, seems to be exposed to an obscure hybridisation. However, some of the most kitsch, colourful and questionable objects of our century – fake flowers – are used in some of your pieces. What does this combination mean?

On top of hybridity, I always want additional layers of narrating the complexity of society; a question, symbol, or implication on certain things. Ready-made objects could carry some of these. This cheap, kitsch materiality could be associated with a product in a market. So it makes my obscure bodies charming, closer to look at, and raises questions. What does it have to do with an orchid flower? Would the body know that it is a flower? Maybe it also intends to use it as a piercing. When I was young, I was fascinated by the story of “fake eggs”— many internet forums talked about some eggs made in a factory. This possibility of mimicry, showing other shapes by different textures and not-accurate forms. However, it hardly resonates with originals. Plastic orchids are very far from their original shape, but they could carry the idea of a particular type of exoticism. Perhaps it reminds viewers of a suspicious Asian massage shop.

Can you tell us a bit about your last exhibition “Rejunevate Body Order Now”? How do the concept and the materiality resonate with contemporary emergencies?

Body modification creates anxiety and fascination. The desperate needs in life are permanently appropriated by the market exploiting this desperation—besides, humans fear technology, which might overtake human capability. The body parts in the exhibition are figurative and abstract, which is more than the body. It might be in the process of growing the human body in the artificial womb; it might be overtaking and parasitising previous bodies. “Rejunevate Body Order Now” presented hybridity and non-binary bodies being captured by a sticky capitalistic web.