In Turkish tales the prince is a wealthy and handsome young man. All his wishes are granted at once. In the eyes of the people he has no troubles at all.
Yet this seemingly luckiest character of the tale carries the heaviest burden. One day he will rule a whole society. He is still young; he lacks enough knowledge and experience. That is why it is impossible for him not to have fears about the future.
This is why in my work I shaped the prince in the pose of a thinking man. His wealth and good looks do not give him enough strength, nor are they enough to solve his problems. With one hand resting on his chin, he appears thoughtful, looking down, with a hopeless expression on his face.
The costume he wears is the symbol of the noble life he comes from. But this nobility never gives him strength. He is the prince of a life full of the suffering he lives within. The pains of real life have swept away his good looks and his youth. The figure’s hunched posture and facial expression show how much the problems around him overwhelm him.
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.