Through ceramics and drawing, Yaren Yildiz explores the body as sensation, visceral, tactile, and in flux. Across mediums, Yildiz hopes to elicit a gut reaction from viewers that goes beyond the visual. Her hand-built ceramic sculptures, shaped through layered coils and slabs, evoke internal states without external lines. They recall organs, fragments, living creatures, forms that resist logical definition yet pulse with their own biological rhythm. Yildiz approach clay as a sentient material, a kind of biological hardware that stores touch and emotion. Each layer holds memory, pressing, stretching, merging until the surface becomes a record of movement and tension. The clay’s sensitivity turns it into a skin fragile, porous, and alive. In her ballpoint pen drawings, form emerges through accumulations of fine, layered lines, much like the coils in her sculptures. These drawn surfaces echo the same visceral impulse, an attempt to feel her way into the body through texture, density, and touch. Yildiz’s works inhabit the threshold between becoming and disintegration, where touch replaces vision as the primary sense. Through this process, Yildiz seeks to translate the invisible pressures of being, those internal sensations that live beneath the surface into form.
Born in Türkiye (1996), works and lives in the United States.
Education
2026- MFA Ceramics, College of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
2020- BFA Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Bilkent University
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025- As Thin As A Promise, Galeri Nev in collaboration with Merdiven Art Space, parallel event to the
18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
2025- Art Current, Kettle Black Gallery, New Bedford, Massachusetts
2024- A Memory Surfaces, The 40th Anniversary of Galeri Nev, Galeri Nev, Ankara
2024- Glimpse, Gallery 65, New Bedford, Massachusetts
2022- Fresh Encounters, CerModern, Ankara
2022- Young, Fresh, Different, Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul
2022- Young Wave, Zulfu Livaneli Culture Center, Ankara
2021- Touched and Thrilled, Galeri Nev, Ankara
2018- Open Studio, Berlin Art Institute, Berlin
2018- Faculty Exhibition, FADA Exhibiton Hall, Bilkent University, Ankara