Artist Statement

In Babay’s works, a vivid, aestheticized, and only seemingly naïve visual language opens a space for inner transformation, fragility, play, and latent strength. Drawing on myth, archetype, and threshold imagery, the artist constructs a universe in which formal lightness becomes a way of approaching what is more unstable and profound: shadow, vulnerability, inner fracture, and the possibility of metamorphosis.

Her practice focuses on states of transition, where opposites do not exclude one another but coexist: light and darkness, instinct and control, tenderness and threat, chaos and structure. Her figures inhabit a space that is at once fairy-tale-like, archetypal, and psychological, where irony becomes a means of expressing complex existential tensions through forms that are light, theatrical, and at times grotesque.

For Babay, ceramics is not simply a medium, but a necessary condition of the work. Clay retains the trace of the gesture, resists, changes state, and undergoes a process of irreversible transformation. In this sense, the material reflects the central concerns of her practice: vulnerability, instinct, metamorphosis, and the tension between control and surrender.

Her research is developed primarily through ceramic sculpture and installation. Each work is made by hand as a unique piece. Materiality and tactility are central elements of her language; alongside ceramics, the artist occasionally also works with metal and plastic, shaping hybrid, ambiguous presences charged with symbolic memory.

"It is impossible to create what you are not."