G枚zde Ilkin: Invisible Bonds, Companion Roots
G枚zde Ilkin has been working for fifteen years with found fabrics and embroidery. Through this handcrafted method, she engages in a critical approach to memory and history to deconstruct notions of gender, community, and forms of belonging.
However, her drawings gradually developed a metaphorical quality, whereby the human body is associated with other entities, human and non-human. Ilkin engages in a deep re-evaluation of values, beliefs, and personal stories through slow-making, sometimes with collaborators, including her mother. Indeed, collectivity is important for the artist, from the making of the fabrics to the exhibition space, where she often works with choreographers, curators, and dancers.
In these series, the humanoid figures of her embroideries expand and interconnect like carnal roots or braided fibres in what seems to be an organic process of becoming rather than the capitalist notions of evolution and progress. This is apparent in the layering of her textile drawings: the cloth pattern, the embroidered figures often overlapping each other, the plant extract expanding on the textile, and the interplay between both sides of the fabric, to name but a few.
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G枚zde Ilkin has been working for fifteen years with found fabrics and embroidery. Through this handcrafted method, she engages in a critical approach to memory and history to deconstruct notions of gender, community, and forms of belonging.
However, her drawings gradually developed a metaphorical quality, whereby the human body is associated with other entities, human and non-human. Ilkin engages in a deep re-evaluation of values, beliefs, and personal stories through slow-making, sometimes with collaborators, including her mother. Indeed, collectivity is important for the artist, from the making of the fabrics to the exhibition space, where she often works with choreographers, curators, and dancers.
In these series, the humanoid figures of her embroideries expand and interconnect like carnal roots or braided fibres in what seems to be an organic process of becoming rather than the capitalist notions of evolution and progress. This is apparent in the layering of her textile drawings: the cloth pattern, the embroidered figures often overlapping each other, the plant extract expanding on the textile, and the interplay between both sides of the fabric, to name but a few.
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