Gözde Balverir Erkman

Born in Ankara in 1981, Gözde Erkman grew up as the youngest of three sisters. The sudden loss of her father at the age of eleven became a turning point in her life and laid the foundation for seeing art as a means of healing. She completed her middle and high school education at an international school in Ankara. During these years, she discovered her creative voice under the guidance of her art teacher, Edwin Hedge, whose encouragement to experiment with different materials taught her to view art as a path to emotional restoration.

Although she received acceptances from prestigious art schools abroad, Erkman chose to stay close to her family and pursued Communication and Design at Bilkent University, graduating with honors. Her education and her curiosity about the world of cinema led her into the film industry. After moving to Istanbul, she worked for many years in various creative fields such as costume, production, and art direction before shifting her focus toward motherhood and art.

In 2011, she co-founded a resortwear brand with her business partner. During this process, she began transferring her signature dot drawings onto fabrics, merging her visual art with design and creating wearable forms that bridged her two creative worlds. During this period, she also attended a tattoo school, and alongside painting, she continued working with ceramics, porcelain, mosaics, and tattoo art.

Throughout her life, Erkman had postponed her long-held dream of exhibiting her work, always setting aside each painting in the hope of creating a better one. After the trauma following her father’s sudden death, the blurring of her memories from childhood, the tricks her memory played on her throughout her life, and her persistent feeling of being lost, she wrote a screenplay titled Lost in Memory. Her artistic journey came full circle as she began creating works inspired by this screenplay, exploring the deceptive nature of memory and the enduring ache of loss. Through her dotwork technique and emotionally expressive color choices, she examines themes of memory, pain, and renewal—reflecting both her personal history and the social pressures of the country she lives in.

Striving to balance motherhood, professional life, and artistic practice, Gözde Erkman now shares her healing works with viewers. Her paintings invite audiences into a calm and profound space where fragility transforms into strength, and where memory forms a bridge between pain, stillness, and serenity.