Simge Guclu’s work explores the importance of public and private spaces within the human psyche and personal history through abstraction, repetitive motifs, and color, cultivating the individual narratives hidden within. She examines what it means to hide and to reveal; the absences and silences, and the mirroring of feelings and ideals in a space. These patterns, stemming from cultural legacies, and modern identities, assemble visually and conceptually expansive pieces, serving as a channel to ponder personal and collective histories, gender, and relationships.

Conceptually and materially entrenched in print, her practice emerges from experimental and traditional printmaking techniques — the layered nature of print, the textures of ink, the unique characteristics of different matrices, and the materiality of papers. These are what allow her to create visuals that emerge from the existence of the print medium itself. Here, print is an impression achieved through the matrix, the image is transformed through the process, reversed and pressed, becoming a relic of the moment of contact between the matrix and the support. A disappearing act of creation, only existing in its remnants. This phantom-like quality of printmaking dimensionally translates the inherit temporality, idiosyncrasies, and drama of human-made spaces into abstractions that peels back the layers of narratives.

Her work carries an ambivalent quality, refusing to be defined in singularity. Ruptures, tears, cuts and reductions, embody the shifting of self from personal, to public, and back to personal — a cycle that perpetuates itself, moving in a spiral from the past to the present into the future with these works, transforming with time and care. This embodied time and spacial quality raises questions of what, in particular, does it mean to look at a past moment of creation and memory, and what does it say about the reality or truth that can be excavated from it. How much of our perspectives shape its future?