by cansu guvenkaya
Mixed Media
h: 150 w: 100 d: 50 (cms).
As an artist I am looking for a place where I can feel that I belong; my travels made me face fears and worries about the future, which threatened my aspirations to exist as an artist. Therefore, I decided to create my own world myself.
Nowadays as contemporary humans become more and more individualistic in the name of liberty, they cannot avoid the inevitability that being free and individual as a person also brings loneliness and fear and my sculptures and paintings suggest a playful and colourful way to oppose this situation.
My sculptures and paintings work like a charm. They research belief and indigenous people’s living systems; how the first humans started painting and sculpting to protect or to heal. My work clears a path to reinterpreting guardianship, the original intent of sculptures in many cultures, in the present day.
Monstrous figures with spiky forms and multiple eyes, mouths and tails swallow and destroy evil. My works carry symbolic signs such as; eyes to spot the negativity, mouths swallow fear and evil, snakes help to heal the figure with their special antidote whenever the figure gets injured. The warm colours demonstrate and reveal the power of these figures possess. In my sculptures, there is a similar defence mechanism that poisonous animals usually have. They have very bright colours or turn bright colours in moments of danger. They push the dangerous ones out of itself, scares them away. These colours are also tearing the viewer away from the real world and makes it easy to switch to the playful space that I try to create.
This game is a protected area standing against certain things. My works embody an expression and a protection against evils of the world, creating a space where evil and fear do not exist; it is an imaginary world of its own.
