"Memorial Beach, 2019" Painting

I am an artist and neuroscientist. I was trained both as an artist (Mimar Sinan University, Fine Arts, Painting) and as a scientist (PhD, Yale University), and my practice moves between visual and analytical ways of understanding the world.

My work explores landscape, perception, and spatial orientation. Drawing on photography, digital construction, painting, and drawing, I create images that occupy an ambiguous territory between representation and abstraction. Landscapes become sites of reflection, where traces of movement, belief, and human presence are embedded within the terrain.

Recent works from the Orientations series investigate how we locate ourselves in relation to place, memory, and one another. Prayer rug geometries, pathways, horizons, and environmental forms are layered and transformed through digital and manual processes, creating images that function simultaneously as landscapes, maps, and spaces of contemplation.

Alongside this recent work, my earlier paintings explored atmosphere, light, and the emotional experience of landscape, often reflecting on distance, migration, and belonging. Across media, I am interested in how environments shape perception and how familiar places can be reimagined through memory and transformation.