Artist Statement:

Idil Duman (she/they), object designer and artist from Turkey, plays with mechanics of functionality and fluidity of sentiment in her work. Using her education and practice as a furniture designer and her personal research on Turkic nomadism, Duman experiments with adding and removing utility from objects, aiming to test the limits of user interaction and invoking collective emotion.

Crafting objects heavily loaded with queer and ethnographic undertones, Duman creates and portrays an experience between the inanimate body of the object and the living body of the audience. 

Through playful elements of movement, texture, and interaction, she builds objects that resemble figurative or literal bodies that move together.

She references folk craft techniques and naturalism in these modern objects, reviving visuals from cultural patterns and clashing them with industrial methods. The variety of material across her objects is crucial in their ability to communicate their experiences to the audience, as the expression of her memories and revelations rely heavily on how those objects feel against the body. They aim to portray that objects are versatile in providing function, and holding memory.