Yeliz Sarmis

My work begins where craft memory meets digital possibility. Trained as a graphic designer in Turkey’s Aegean region, I create digital compositions that translate the visual language of traditional textile arts — embroidery, beadwork, crochet, ornamental pattern — into contemporary portraits exploring femininity, identity, and psychological depth.

A recurring gesture across my work is the closed eye: figures turning inward, wrapped in ornamental layers that function as both armor and revelation. These are portraits not of appearance but of interiority — the textures of memory, the weight of cultural inheritance carried in the body.

My visual language spans from the warm, tactile glow of textile-simulated surfaces to neon-noir intensity, from Art Nouveau elegance to raw expressionist rupture, from kintsugi’s golden repair to the vanishing point of a veiled figure. What connects these extremes is an insistence that decoration carries meaning — that ornament is how cultures encode beauty, survival, and identity into the everyday.

Each piece asks the same question differently: what lies beneath the surface we present to the world?

Yeliz Sarmis (b. Turkey) is a digital and mixed-media artist based in Izmir, Turkey, with over a decad...

Graphic Design from Dokuz Eylül University,