In the tales the Giant’s Mother is huge like the giants, ugly and frightening. Yet inside this frightening body, unlike the giants, she carries a merciful and motherly character. She is the tale’s most critical threshold. When the hero comes up behind her and suckles her milk, he is counted as her child from then on; the Giant’s Mother protects him and keeps the other giants from harming him.
This motif is one of the most ancient matriarchal traces in Anatolian tales. She is a mother who is feared but in whom one also takes refuge.
The Giant’s Mother I have shaped is, in keeping with these qualities, ugly, frightening and primitive in appearance. She holds a ladle in her hand and stands as if cooking at the cauldron before her. This cauldron is the vessel not only of cannibalism but also of abundance. In it she boils the bounty of the whole world. The burnt, earthy texture given by smoke firing emphasises her primeval power, coming from ages past. The cauldron is the symbol of the boundless motherliness and mercy behind this ugliness.
Passed down from generation to generation in Anatolia’s oral culture, folk tales are not merely fantastical stories; they carry a society’s fears, hopes, transformations and shared memory.
“The Memory of Tales” reinterprets characters such as Şahmaran, the Zümrüdüanka, Keloğlan, the giant, the giant’s mother, the sultan and the prince in the language of contemporary ceramic sculpture.
Shaped by hand, each figure goes beyond its appearance in the traditional tale and becomes an original work of art carrying its own symbolic meaning and story.