Memory Vessels 1 & 2

Size: 58 x 20 x20 cm (Each Piece)

Technique: Underglaze Painting on Porcelain

Year: 2026

Memory Vessels explores memory not as a fixed archive of the past but as a fluid and evolving process shaped by perception, personal experience, and time. Rather than preserving complete narratives, memory continuously edits, fragments, and reconstructs lived experiences, allowing meanings to shift with each act of recollection. The series reflects on this instability by combining traditional ceramic ornamentation with visual references drawn from digital culture, creating a dialogue between inherited cultural symbols and contemporary systems of information.

Created during my time in Jingdezhen, China, the works emerged from my experience of living between cultures and navigating multiple layers of identity, language, and cultural memory. This condition of cultural transition became central to my artistic practice, prompting me to question how memories are preserved, transformed, or partially lost as they move across geographical, historical, and personal boundaries. Ceramic, a material historically associated with permanence and cultural continuity, becomes a metaphorical vessel that contains not complete histories but fragments of lived experience.

Both vessels are centered around the Tree of Life, one of the oldest and most enduring symbols in Turkish and Anatolian visual culture. Traditionally representing continuity, regeneration, interconnectedness, and the transmission of life across generations, the Tree of Life functions here as a metaphor for memory itself—constantly growing while carrying traces of the past. Its ornamental structure draws upon traditional Turkish ceramic decoration while simultaneously becoming disrupted by pixel-like forms inspired by QR codes, digital imagery, and contemporary data systems. These fragmented black interventions interrupt the visual continuity of the compositions, suggesting the instability of remembrance in an increasingly digital world.

While Memory Vessel I focuses on perception as the foundation of memory, it investigates how visual information is filtered through individual experience before becoming remembrance. Familiar ornamental motifs gradually dissolve beneath pixelated interventions, emphasizing that every memory is shaped by subjective interpretation rather than objective reality. What appears complete at first glance reveals itself as fragmented, demonstrating how perception continuously transforms experience into personal memory.

Memory Vessel II extends this investigation by examining memory after it has been formed. Here, the fragmented pixel-like structures obscure parts of the Tree of Life, functioning as visual metaphors for remembering and forgetting. Some details remain vivid while others disappear, are concealed, or are reconstructed over time. The coexistence of traditional ceramic ornamentation and digital references reflects the contemporary condition in which cultural heritage and digital information systems exist simultaneously, influencing how personal and collective memories are created, preserved, and transmitted.

Together, the two vessels propose that memory exists between permanence and transformation. Although ceramic has historically served as a medium for preserving culture across centuries, these works suggest that what survives is never entirely complete. Memory remains selective, layered, and continuously rewritten through perception, absence, and reinterpretation. By bringing together traditional Turkish symbolism, contemporary digital visual language, and personal experiences of cultural displacement, Memory Vessels reflects on how identities are continually reconstructed across time, place, and lived experience.