Deniz Ozuygur

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

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2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads

70 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 x 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

Girls is a series of large-scale fuse-bead text panels. Using child-coded materials and phrases drawn from the overlapping territory of girlhood and adult culture, the series examines how language collapses the distinction between female children and adult women — how the same words move freely between a daughter's bedroom and a strip club, between a childhood game and a pornographic category.

Each panel is built from fused plastic beads in a palette drawn from teen makeup: nude, bubblegum, hot pink, cherry red. Each surface is uneven and velvety, marked by ironing pressure and heat.

Drawing on my experience coming of age in New York in the 2000s, the series reflects on how permeable the line of protection around girls has always been — and how much of that permeability is built into ordinary language itself. The series is ongoing.

2026, fuse beads
102 × 102 cm (framed)

GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS is the first work in the series. The phrase is a direct appropriation of the most common strip-club sign — three words that name a child, stacked and repeated until they become something else entirely.

2026, fuse beads
98 × 98 cm

BREAST FRIENDS FOREVER replaces the "best" in "BFF" with "breast" — one word swap that collapses the intimate language of girlhood friendship into the moment the body becomes visible and the male gaze arrives.

2026, fuse beads
98 × 98 cm

TRUTH OR BARELY LEGAL combines the childhood game "truth or dare" with Barely Legal, a pornographic magazine built around the fantasy of underage girls.

2026, fuse beads
98 × 98 cm

WHO'S YOUR DADDY'S GIRL collapses "daddy's girl," an endearment for a beloved daughter, into "who's your daddy?," a phrase borrowed from pornography.

2026, fuse beads
98 × 98 cm

POWERPUFF GIRLS GONE WILD places a cartoon about girl empowerment beside a reality franchise built on filming teenage girls exposing themselves. Two things that occupied the same television screen in my childhood.

2026, fuse-bead covers, 11 monotype acrylic prints on handmade Awagami Factory Kozo paper

22 × 16 × 1.5 cm

Edition of 10 + 2AP

Girls is an artist book that examines how “girls” — a word used to describe female children and adolescents — is recoded through culture. It looks not only at the word itself, but at the visual language attached to girlhood: how it appears in girls’ bedrooms, consumer products, and the sex industry.

The book contains five pairs of found images printed in acrylic on handmade Japanese paper. In each spread, a strip-club sign appears on the left; girls’ bedroom décor appears on the right. The pairings work through repeated language: “Live Girls” beside “you’re like really pretty,” “Baby Dolls” beside “Baby Girl,” “XXX” beside “xoxo.” Printed in the same pink monochrome, the two sources become formally indistinguishable.

The book’s small scale recalls diaries. Its fuse-bead covers place it in the register of children’s craft. Girls was shown as part of the project SLEEPOVER at the 2026 border_less Artbook Fair at SALT Galata, Istanbul, where it received the Best Table Award.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

 19 × 171 cm (installation)

Happy Brideday Banner is a fuse-bead garland that uses the visual format of a child’s birthday decoration. From a distance it reads as “Happy Birthday.” At close range, the wording resolves as brideday. The work relies on this shift in reading, holding birthday and wedding in the same object and treating celebration as a script of ceremony, display, and expectation.

2024, ütülenen boncuklar ve olta ipi

19 × 290 cm

(enstelasyon)

2024-2025, fuse beads & fishing line

115 cm (h), circumference 133 cm

Here Comes The Cake is a seven-tier wedding cake made out of 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 patterns circling each layer are drawn from preschool line-exercise worksheets. As the cake topper, a wedding ring sits beside a pacifier.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

10 × R:52 cm

Brideday Girl Tiara is a fuse-bead crown that reframes the familiar “birthday girl” accessory.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

22 cm3 each (3 piece installation)

Brideday Present: Arranged Blocks is a set of three oversized fuse-bead ABC blocks, staged as gifts for the figure at the center of the Brideday celebration—both bride and child. Each cube combines baby vocabulary with wedding vocabulary across its faces, collapsing two life stages into the same object.

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

115 cm (h), circumference 141 cm

Mama’s Gonna Buy You a Diamond Ring.. is a fuse-bead baby mobile mounted on a wind-up musical crib mechanism. A circular band spells a line from the nursery rhyme as it rotates. Literalized as an object for a crib, the lyric reads as a promise of a diamond ring in exchange for a baby’s silence.

2025, fuse beads, fishing line & motors

variable dimensions (7 piece kinetic installation)

Seven miniature cakes, each topped with a symbol from the Happy Brideday panels. Three rotate slowly on hidden motors, echoing the movement of the baby mobile.

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

75 × 103 cm (Framed)

2025, fuse beads

89 × 89 cm (framed)

2025, fuse beads

89 × 89 cm (framed)

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)

2025, fuse beads & chain link rings

175 x 197 cm

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

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.

Modified wall clock filled with air-dry clay painted with tea

29 cm, edition of 3

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, set of 9 monotype acrylic prints on 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 representation. At first glance the works appear to depict ovulation — but what appear as sperm are prints of tampons, and the egg shapes are impressions of my breasts. The series explores parthenogenesis as a metaphor for independent artistic creation and autonomy. 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, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 x 35 cm each

2024, Single channel video, 1 min 15 seec.