Pinar Baklan Önal

Artist Statement

The aim of artist by presenting her first series ceramic works is impresssing the people by visual and optical illusions. She wanted to create and design ceramic forms have naturel lines but impossible and not existing decorations in real. Thats why she wanted to make unique forms and use visual elements like color, texture, lines, dots, light etc. Now, her aim is seeing illusions through different designs on ceramic material. Her works from last series, reflecs the sensitivity of her and create the awareness about nature, environment and activism by the way of optical she described. She thinks that she can not stay far away from optical designs whatever she does. She uses bright colors with pigments on her recent works. Last, coloured works of her can be seen as figurative ceramic sculptures who try to take peoples attentions with their colors and decorations. These coloured figures whisper something to people to warn them about environmental problems. Some of her abstract figurative works are couple, like man/woman or human/animal. She wants to express her idea about completing eacher other like in nature. She plans to work with different clays and add aggragates to clays on her next works. She has plans and sketches for a new serie with different and aggragates clays.

-- Pinar Baklan Önal

Bio

After graduating from Ceramics Department at Fine Arts Faculty in 2007, Hacettepe University with a first-class honors degree she started the master’s program at the same department and university, and completed the program in 2011. In 2012, Pinar Baklan Önal started her Ph.D on ceramics at Fine Arts Institute at Hacettepe University. Participating in lots of group exhibitions and symposiums at international and national medium she opened her first solo exhibition in Kayseri Orta Anadolu Demir Karamancı Convention Center in February of 2013. Her second solo exhibition was opened in Ankara Nurol Art Gallery, Turkey in January of 2015. Her last solo show was opened in İzmir İşsanat Gallery between 26th January and 26th February 2016. She received eigth awards national and international, one of which is a research scholarship allocated for three-month period by Polish Government in April, 2013. She has also worked at an art studio making wall reliefs for many individual and public organizations. In 2009, she started to work as a research assistant at Ceramics and Glass Design Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Erciyes University, and has been working as a lecturer at the same department at Erciyes University, since 2012. She currently keeps going to experience working with ceramic material.