Gul Yildiz works in Istanbul, in emotive, figurative stills: her Editions, the drops she runs through Ninfa, and her one-of-ones. I collected her at mint and on the secondary, the way you do when someone's work keeps stopping you. What I did not expect was how much of the conversation would flow back the other way.

She writes like her pictures

Her captions read like the images: quiet, interior, unhurried. Loneliness does not mean that there are no people around a person, she wrote once. A person feels lonely when they cannot convey the things inside them. When she dropped a piece called Serene she framed it plainly: a quiet place to get away from the chaos of the metropolis and listen to yourself and to nature. She is also, it turns out, the kind of working artist who gets invited to give a seminar at Fujifilm on the evolution of art from the traditional. She is not posturing. She is just paying attention, and asking you to.

Engineer first

The bio she sent me this September fills in the road, and it explains the stillness. She studied engineering first. Then photography and videography, then television and radio, then a master's in cinema at Marmara University. She is an Official Fujifilm Photographer, which is why that seminar invitation was never a fluke: she teaches photography, cinema theory, and art history there and in her own studio, sits on international competition juries, holds the AFIAP distinction, and has written three books on cinema and photography. She has been photographing ballerinas since 2015, across countries and cultures, alongside a minimalist architectural practice built on geometry, space, light, and symmetry. She came to NFTs in late 2021 and has spoken at NFT events in Lisbon and Bucharest, where she also curated the photography. Look at Death of Beauty again with all of that behind it. An engineer's symmetry, a dancer's stillness, a filmmaker's patience about when the frame is allowed to end. Her full statement is on her room, in her own words.

The two-way street

Gul is near the top of the list of artists who collect me back, and she does it out loud. I have just collected 2 editions of Crimson Shimmer by @pengwinpants, she posted in January. Then COLLECTED x2 editions, Florida Sunset, from @pengwinpants. Then Collected mossy_grove_01 by @pengwinpants. Then, simplest of all, I collected from @pengwinpants. I need to go to nature. Every one of those is a real notification I actually got. Collecting her stopped being a transaction and turned into a correspondence.

There is a softness in her work that is easy to underrate and hard to make. It holds up across a wall, not just in a single frame. Her room gathers what I have, at mint and through Ninfa, with her own words alongside. Sit with Serene and you will understand the rest.