Deniz Ozuygur

The Mommy? series uses fuse beads — the same plastic craft beads children use to make keychains and coasters — to create large-scale, text-based works about the intersection of motherhood and artistic identity. To make each piece, tens of thousands of beads are placed by hand and fused with an iron, turning a domestic chore into part of the artwork itself. The surfaces hold traces of heat, pressure, and time.

The series began while I was playing with my children and their fuse beads. My daughter looked up and asked, "Mommy, did you used to be an artist?" The question became both the starting point of the series and my way back into my practice.

Each piece is made of approximately 30,000 beads and renders a candid question my children have asked. The early works stayed close to motherhood and the loss of selfhood inside it — "Mommy, what was your name as a kid?", "Mommy, can you wipe my butt?" As the children grew, their questions turned outward, opening onto wider cultural and political concerns — "Mommy, did Trump start the fire?", "Mommy, do thieves have mothers?"

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

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2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70.5 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads

70.5 x 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads

70 × 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 × 95 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 x 97 cm

2023, fuse beads, 70.5 x 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 58 x 87cm

2025, fuse beads, 70 × 97 cm

2025, fuse beads, 71 × 106 cm

2025, fuse baeds, 70 × 97 cm

2024, fuse beads, 70 × 97 cm

Girls is a series of large-scale fuse-bead text panels. Using a craft-coded material to write 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 fuse beads in a palette drawn from teen makeup: nude, bubblegum, hot pink, cherry red. The uneven melting from the ironing creates a velvety texture and almost scar-like wounds to the surface.

Drawing on my experience coming of age in NYC 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, 98 × 98 cm

GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS is the first work in the series. The phrase is a direct appropriation of the most common strip-club sign — as well as the title of a Mötley Crüe song about strippers — 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 beads, 98 × 98 cm

PIZZA DELIVERY ROOM joins "pizza," a child's favorite food, with "delivery room," the site of birth — two innocuous phrases that, placed together, take on the coded vocabulary online cultures have built around the trafficking of children.

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 cm (h) × 52 cm (circumference)

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

2025, fuse beads & fishing line

22 × 22 × 22 cm 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 × 100 cm. Ongoing.

Ana-Dolu marks my return to art, made while I was pregnant with my second child in 2017. The title is a play on words: Anadolu, Turkish for Anatolia, the region often called the cradle of civilization, and ana dolu, "mother-filled." The piece sits between my New York artist past and my Turkish wife-and-mother present. It centers on mantı, a traditional dish that takes hours to make and is eaten in an instant. In Kayseri, mantı is tied to marriage and used to judge a bride-to-be. By making it from clay, I render it empty and inedible. Shaping the clay mantı is a private protest against the labor traditionally assigned to women.

2024, clock, clay and tea, 29 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP

The title combines mantı, mantıksız ("illogical"), and tıksız ("not working"). It continues the mantı of Ana-Dolu and widens its metaphor. The clock, filled with clay mantı, marks the invisible time housework takes — labor undervalued and expected to go unnoticed.

2024, clay, approximately 3 × 2 cm each, variable installation. Ongoing.

Building on Ana-Dolu, this series shapes çiğ köfte, another traditional dish, from clay. Like mantı, it stands for labor-intensive work, but here it also carries power and protest, figured in the clenched fist. Each piece holds the negative space of a fist — an imprint of absence: silent protest, unspoken truths, invisible labor.

2024, monotype, acrylic on archival paper, 50 × 35 cm each. Ongoing.

Immaculate Conception rereads the Virgin Mary's sinless conception through prints that merge biology with symbol. The images first read as ovulation. On closer look, the "sperm" are tampon prints and the "eggs" are impressions of my breasts. The series takes parthenogenesis as a metaphor for making art alone.

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 sec.

2023, Photograph.