MFA 2026 Artists MFA 2026 Artists: Yaren Yıldız

About Yaren Yıldız

Yaren Yildiz is a multidisciplinary artist from Turkey, based in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Bilkent University, Turkey as the valedictorian of the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture. Yildiz is currently pursuing an MFA in Ceramics at UMass Dartmouth, where she holds a Teaching Fellowship and teaches Foundation Drawing and Handbuilding Ceramics. She previously worked as an assistant instructor in Art History and Film & Media Studies. Yildiz has expanded her practice through ceramics workshops and a residency in Berlin Art Institute, Germany and has exhibited regionally and internationally, including Galeri Nev with Merdiven Art Space (parallel to the 18th Istanbul Biennial), an open studio in Berlin Art Institute, Germany, University of North Carolina Asheville, and Hatch Street Studios in New Bedford, MA.

Statement

Through ceramics and drawing, Yaren Yildiz explores the body as sensation, visceral, tactile, and in flux. Across mediums, Yildiz hopes to elicit a gut reaction from viewers that goes beyond the visual.  Her hand-built ceramic sculptures, shaped through layered coils and slabs, evoke internal states without external lines. They recall organs, fragments, living creatures, forms that resist logical definition yet pulse with their own biological rhythm. Yildiz approach clay as a sentient material, a kind of biological hardware that stores touch and emotion. Each layer holds memory, pressing, stretching, and merging until the surface becomes a record of movement and tension. The clay’s sensitivity turns it into a skin fragile, porous, and alive. In her ballpoint pen drawings, form emerges through accumulations of fine, layered lines, much like the coils in her sculptures. These drawn surfaces echo the same visceral impulse, an attempt to feel her way into the body through texture, density, and touch. Yildiz’s works inhabit the threshold between becoming and disintegration, where touch replaces vision as the primary sense. Through this process, Yildiz seeks to translate the invisible pressures of being, those internal sensations that live beneath the surface into form.

Website: yarenyildiz.com