Through ceramics, painting, and drawing, Yaren Yildiz’s work explores the body as sensation, visceral, tactile, and in flux. Her hand-built ceramic sculptures, shaped through layered coils and slabs, emerge as internal states without external lines. They recall organs, fragments, or living creatures, forms that resist logical structure yet pulse with their own biological rhythm. Yildiz approaches clay as a sentient material, a kind of biological hardware that stores touch and sensation. Each layer holds memory: pressing, stretching, merging until the surface becomes a record of movement. Her works, too, act as biological hardware, extensions of the body that register the energy of making, recording each tension and release within their layered surfaces. The clay’s sensitivity turns it into a skin fragile, porous, and alive. Her 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 drive 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