When I look at paper I enter a space in which the landscape of a page is at once a sculptural and a narrative place.

I am a painter and book artist working at the intersection of memory, identity, and collective experience. Through abstract, layered compositions—rendered in oil, ink, and repurposed materials—I create tactile, minimal works that confront themes of war, confinement, and human resilience. My paintings are haptic reflections shaped by hand, while my sculptural artist books stand as conceptual and narrative objects in their own right. Collected by institutions such as the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress, and the Herzog August Bibliothek, my work invites deep engagement and challenges silence through form, texture, and presence.

The longer story…

There was always paper in the house when I grew up. My father worked in a print shop where they would print large scale maps for the State Surveying Office, and he would often come home with various sizes, from life sized to tiny paper pads, of neatly cut paper scraps for me to play with, to use, to create.

Same thing with books. There were always books and newsprint in my life. My grandmother would send us Turkish newspapers she collected every week, and at home, books in Turkish and German language were a given for me to explore. Later in life, Dutch and English books were added to my shelves together with any other language I found interesting to look at regardless of not knowing the language well or at all. Old books from a time when Russian thinkers were essential, before they were sent to Siberia - like Что делать?, Nikolei Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?. I couldn’t read the original words nor have I read much of the German translation but the book’s paper, type, smell and weight referred and connected me to a certain time in history.

Fast forward (thirty or so years) and I find myself playing with paper and paint again.

My first artists’ book was a coincidence. I’d published three graphic novels but the next story I wanted to tell didn’t wanted to be a “regular” published book. I had all the images, drawings and the storyline but no idea how, what to do with that. I didn’t know that something called artists’ book existed until my residency at the Artists’ League in Vytlacil, NY. On my way to the residency I’d picked up copies of the Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly art paper, simply because I thought the copy had the right size and amount of pages for the book I had in mind. I found the idea of recycling used paper comforting, like entering and sharing my story to an already existing world instead facing the emptiness of new white paper. Someone looked at my paint and ink stained creation during a studio visit and pointed out that this is an artists’ book and that I should talk to the people at Booklyn, an artists run non-profit who deals in artists’ books. I did and the rest is history. Or simply my story for since then I create art on pages. So called artists’ books.

I’m self-taught. Like so many women artists from the eighties and nineties my art, too, often developed on a kitchen table.

I developed my art practice using materials that are part of my daily life—things we commonly use in society, like butcher’s paper and onion skin paper. Working with these everyday surfaces led me to develop and refine the line blot technique, which has since become a cornerstone of my artistic voice.

Another cornerstone was discovering the power of cartoons—their simplified reality revealed abstraction and minimalism as a universal language. I realized that all you need to tell a visual story is a pen and paper, no matter who or where you are. Since then, I’ve led workshops on sequential art across Syria, Lebanon, Germany, the UK, the US, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

This same sensibility also drew me to abstract painting, which I see as another universal language. My emotional narratives are deeply influenced by my love of comics—especially the way Japanese manga create a sense of place and mood through color.

The journey of the girl who played with paper and paint in a multicultural, multilingual upbringing led me to see the whole world as my playground. This perspective has fueled a constant search for the simplest, most essential ways we can communicate and connect. For me, that universal language is visual art— and I express it through artists' books and painting.