Bengu Cetinkale

Lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA

Artist statement

I am a self-taught artist working across painting, sculpture, and mixed media. My work is guided by an intuitive relationship with material, form, surface, and color, allowing each body of work to develop its own visual language. My sculptural practice emerged through my maternal experience and the physical and emotional transformations surrounding birth. This experience became the foundation for the Birth Series, in which I explore the body, formation, existence, and the gradual emergence of identity. The Birth Series approaches birth not as a single event, but as an ongoing passage from Becoming to Being. Becoming traces the journey toward form—the body emerging, gathering, and taking shape. Being begins once that form exists: the experience of inhabiting the body, encountering the world, and gradually developing a sense of self. The sculptures are built through an intuitive, material-driven process of layering, shaping, drying, sanding, and rebuilding. Irregular surfaces, folds, cavities, and protrusions allow the forms to move between the bodily and the abstract without becoming literal representations. Through this body of work, I consider the body not as a fixed form, but as something continually shaped by experience—formed physically, inhabited emotionally, and transformed over time.

Artwork