
Traces from the Past and the Sea
TR
This oil pastel portrait constructs a conceptual landscape in which sea, land, and island operate as symbolic registers of memory. The work explores how temporal erosion shapes perception, situating identity within a continuous negotiation between grounding, fluidity, and isolation.
€ 150
Özlem Bulkan' More From
In my practice, I explore memory as a shifting terrain where landscape becomes a vessel for inner experience. Working with oil pastel, I construct symbolic geographies in which sea, land, and island are not fixed entities, but fluid states shaped by time, erosion, and perception.
The sea functions as a carrier of remembrance, the land as a grounding presence, and the island as a fragile articulation of isolation and identity. These elements are in constant flux, dissolving into one another and creating a quiet tension between presence and absence, stability and disappearance.
Rather than depicting an external landscape, my work proposes an interior topography where memory, time, and materiality intersect. Through this process, fragmentation becomes structure, and emotional and geographical registers are held in a delicate and continuous negotiation.