Deniz Ozuygur

2025, fuse beads & chain link rings

175 x 197 cm

Maşallah, she’s got Bette Davis eyes is a wall-hung bead curtain that combines the Turkish phrase maşallah—spoken as both compliment and protection—with a pop-cultural reference to Hollywood. The field is built from repeated blue “evil eyes.” The curtain operates as both amulet and surveillance, and holds the tension between East and West in a single surface.

2024-2025, fuse beads & fishing line

115 x R:133 cm

Here Comes The Cake is a seven-tier wedding cake built entirely from fuse beads. Sized to the height of my daughter, the sculpture collapses wedding spectacle and childhood into a single, towering form: a cake for a child bride. The decorative patterns circling each layer are drawn from my daughter’s preschool line-exercise worksheet. At the top, a wedding ring sits beside a pacifier, pairing adult commitment with infant dependence.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

10 x R:52 cm

Brideday Girl Tiara is a fuse-bead crown that turns a familiar “birthday girl” accessory into a slippery title.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

21.952 cm3 each (3 piece installation)

Brideday Present: Arranged Blocks is a set of three oversized ABC blocks, staged as gifts for the imaginary figure who is both bride and baby. The faces of each cube combines baby vocabulary with wedding vocabulary, collapsing two life stages into the same object.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

115 x R:141 cm

Mama’s Gonna Buy You a Diamond Ring.. is a baby mobile, mounted on a wind-up musical crib mechanism. A circular band spells the lyric as it rotates, while a mix of child and adult coded icons are suspended. Sung innocently to soothe infants, the line becomes unsettling when literalized in a crib toy: a promise of reward for being quiet.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

 19 x 171 cm (installation)

Happy Brideday Banner is a fuse-bead garland that borrows the visual grammar of a child’s birthday party. From a distance it reads as “Happy Birthday.” Up close, the phrase slips: brideday. The work hinges on that second take, where a harmless celebration becomes uncertain—birthday or wedding, play or ritual—pointing to how quickly girlhood is dressed in adult scripts of ceremony, display, and expectation.

2024, ütülenen boncuklar ve olta ipi

19 × 290 cm

(enstelasyon)

2025, fuse beads, fishing line & motors

variable dimensions (7 piece kinetic installation)

A series of rotating mini-cakes.

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm

2025, fuse beads

89 ×89 (framed)

2025, fuse beads

89 × 89 cm

2025, fuse beads

89 × 89 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

71.5 x 57.5 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

71.5 x 57.5 cm (framed)

The Mommy? series uses fuse beads—a material from my children’s toys—to create large-scale, text-based works that embody the intersection of motherhood and artistic identity. The series began when my daughter asked me: “Mommy, did you used to be an artist?” This innocently profound inquiry prompted a reflection on the loss of selfhood of the mother.

Each piece in the series is made of approximately 30,000 beads and features candid questions my children have asked, including “Mommy, what was your name before me?”, “Mommy, can you wipe my butt?”, and “Mommy, can I have everything of yours?”

The process of ironing the beads together transforms a mundane domestic chore into an artistic act, serving as a private protest similar to the creation of clay mantı in Ana-Dolu.

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 95 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 95 cm

.

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70 x 97cm

2023, fuse beads

70 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97cm

2024, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2023, eriyen boncuk

70 x 97 cm

2024, eriyen boncuk

70.5 x 97cm

2023, eriyen boncuk

70.5 x 95 cm

2024, eriyen boncuk

70.5 x 97cm

2023, eriyen boncuk

70.5 x 97 cm

2023, eriyen boncuk

70 x 97 cm

2023, eriyen boncuk

70 x 97 cm

2024, eriyen boncuk

58 x 87cm

2025, eriyen boncuk

70 × 97 cm

2025, eriyen boncuk

71 × 106 cm

2025, eriyen boncuk

70 × 97 cm

2024, eriyen boncuk

70 × 97 cm

2017-2019, clay and tea on canvas

70 x 100 cm

Ana-Dolu combines Anadolu (Anatolia) with ana dolu—“mother-filled.” The work centers on mantı, a traditional Turkish dumpling that requires sustained labor to prepare and is consumed in minutes. In Kayseri, mantı is closely tied to marriage rituals and can function as a marker of domestic competence. By crafting mantı from clay—empty and inedible—I remove their use-value and shift the dish into an object: a stand-in for housework, caregiving, and the body as a vessel.

The project is built through repetition. Each dumpling is formed by hand, one by one, making labor—normally erased by consumption—remain visible and accumulate as mass. Ana-Dolu is ongoing; the mantı form has become a recurring motif in new iterations and materials.

2024, Clock, clay and tea

29 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP

Mantıksız Saat is a play on words combining mantı (the traditional Turkish dish), mantıksız (meaning “illogical”), and tıksız (suggesting “without movement” or “not working”). This piece continues the exploration of mantı introduced in Ana-Dolu, expanding its metaphorical significance.

2024, clay

approximately 3 × 2 cm each (variable size installation)

Building on themes from Ana-Dolu, Çiğ Çiğ, Acı Acı explores resistance through the act of shaping çiğ köfte—a traditional Turkish dish—from clay. As with mantı, the form becomes a marker of labor-intensive work, but here it also carries the imagery of protest through the clenched fist. Each clay çiğ köfte holds the negative space of a fist: an imprint of pressure and absence that points to silent protest, unspoken truths, and invisible labor.

This series is ongoing.

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm each

Immaculate Conception reinterprets the art historical theme of the Virgin Mary’s sinless conception through a series of prints that merge biological imagery with symbolic representations. Initially appearing to depict ovulation, closer inspection reveals ‘sperm’ as tampon prints and ‘eggs’ as impressions of my breasts.

An exploration of the concept of parthenogenesis as a metaphor for independent artistic creation.

This is an ongoing series.

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm

2024, Single channel video, 1 min 15 seec.

2023, Photograph.

2023, Photograph.