Vague

I work under the name Vague.

Not to hide, but because the name was never the point. What matters is the feeling — and feeling belongs to everyone. The moment a piece becomes only mine, it stops being yours. So I stay a little indistinct, and let the work do the meeting.

Vague is also la vague — French for the wave. It's the closest thing I've found to the way feeling actually moves: it rises without warning, it pulls, it breaks, and then it returns. Every piece I make is one of those waves, held still for a moment before it goes.

I've been making things since I was a child — not because anyone asked, but because feeling needed somewhere to go. There is no single technique here. The technique is feeling itself. A piece begins as something felt — the weight and the lightness of being human — and slowly becomes something you can live with on a wall.

I work from Istanbul, a city that never stops feeling. My only real source is people: the way we love, lose, hope, and keep going anyway. I've watched the happy and the hopeless, the ones who stayed and the ones who left — and underneath all of it, we seem to carry the same thing. A feeling we could never quite name.

I'm not here to decorate your walls. I'm here to remind you that you're human — and that whatever you're feeling, someone, somewhere, has felt it too. That is the only reason I make anything at all.

Not perfect. Not flawless. Just feeling.

— Vague