“Machine embroidery is not simply a technique; it is an integral part of the narrative itself.”
Memory Drawn Through Thread
Benlioglu’s machine embroidered works bring mythology into contact with memory, identity, and lived experience. Trained in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design at Sabancı University, where her primary specialization was 2D animation, she approaches textile through a foundation in visual storytelling, movement, and image making. That background remains present in the way she builds narratives, even though thread and fabric have replaced animation as the central means of production. Her current practice asks how stories inherited from the past can speak to present questions, and how private experiences can find echoes within collective narratives.
Embroidery entered her life long before it became an artistic medium. Her aunt taught machine embroidery in Ankara, and Benlioglu spent summer holidays watching lessons in the studio. She remembers the machines running, music playing as students worked, the atmosphere of the room, and the objects that emerged from those sessions. Those memories stayed positive and vivid. Years later, they offered an unexpected point of return, connecting a childhood environment of making with a professional practice she had not yet imagined.
That return occurred during the pandemic, when Benlioglu was experiencing a period of deep unhappiness and made an intuitive decision to turn toward textile art. She was searching for something that could help her move through that emotional state. What began as a personal response became a sustained artistic language. She also felt pressure from experiences and emotions accumulated over many years, and a need to make them visible because she understood that others could recognize aspects of themselves within them. She regards her first two professional works, Miss Bipolar and White Plague Madonna, as a kind of cosmological summary of her life, rooted in illnesses she herself experienced.
Benlioglu: Mythology as a Living Structure
The shift into textile did more than introduce Benlioglu to a new process. It clarified the subjects that had been gathering around her work: memory, identity, relationships, power, and the construction of the self. Personal experience was the starting point, but it gradually opened onto wider questions. Mythology became particularly important because it offered narratives that could be reconsidered rather than simply repeated. For Benlioglu, mythological characters are not sealed inside antiquity. Their stories can be brought into conversation with contemporary experiences and concerns.
Her visual language is inseparable from machine embroidery. Thread functions as line, while repetition, layering, density, and surface shape both image and narrative. The medium is not treated as ornament or as a craft technique placed in service of a separate concept. Its physical behavior helps construct meaning. Repeated stitches accumulate slowly, turning time into a visible component of the work and allowing memory to be understood not as a static archive, but as something built, revisited, and transformed.
This approach also creates a meeting point between different parts of Benlioglu’s history. She has no formal academic training in machine embroidery or traditional Turkish arts, yet embroidery carries the imprint of her childhood, while her recent personal exploration of traditional Turkish tile art extends her interest in culturally embedded forms of making. Alongside her education in contemporary visual communication, these interests allow personal history, cultural memory, and present-day image making to occupy the same field. The tension between inherited forms and contemporary interpretation has become central to how she thinks through an artwork.
Persephone Between Experience and Memory
One work makes this intersection especially clear. The Monologue That Blooms Under and Above draws on the story of Persephone, a figure Benlioglu chose because the myth continues to raise questions she considers relevant now. She reads the narrative through power, control, choice, transformation, and individual agency. Rather than illustrating the ancient story as a fixed account, she uses it as a structure for examining experiences that persist in altered forms across different periods and circumstances.
The work acquired a personal dimension after a trip to Şanlıurfa, where Benlioglu witnessed a situation that stayed with her. She does not reduce that experience to anecdote. Instead, its impact led her back to Persephone and sharpened her attention to the dynamics of power, control, and agency within the myth. A story inherited from antiquity and a moment from her own life unexpectedly converged, giving the work a space in which observation, personal memory, and collective narrative could coexist without becoming interchangeable.
Machine embroidery intensifies that connection. Layers of thread, recurring gestures, and linear structures form the image while also determining how its story develops. The repetitive, time-based process reinforces the themes of memory and transformation that brought Benlioglu to Persephone in the first place. The Monologue That Blooms Under and Above therefore matters to her not only as a contemporary mythological interpretation, but as a point of contact between a shared cultural story and an experience held privately. Its significance rests precisely in that movement between the two.
Benlioglu: Building Images Through Time
Research comes before drawing in Benlioglu’s studio. She begins by studying the story, character, and mythological or cultural context behind a potential work, then develops its narrative and visual character mentally before sketching. Once the image begins to settle, she develops the design digitally and eventually transfers it to fabric. Her background in animation and visual communication remains relevant here: an artwork is conceived through stages of visual construction before the embroidery machine begins to translate that planning into a physical surface.
The technical preparation is equally deliberate. Before embroidering the final fabric, Benlioglu maintains the machine and tests thread, needle, density, and machine settings on a separate piece. Small adjustments can change both the appearance of the image and the response of the fabric. Production is demanding in duration as well as precision. Working consistently for seven to eight hours a day, she estimates that a medium sized piece can require roughly two to two and a half months. Needle thickness, fabric structure, stitch density, and even heat generated by the machine motor can alter the schedule. Time becomes embedded in the work rather than remaining a logistical detail.
Benlioglu is currently working on her fourth piece, Bust of Hera, continuing her contemporary examination of mythological narratives. She expects her next project to focus on Zeus’s six wives, widening her attention from a single figure toward a network of female characters, their individual positions, relationships, and connections. The project extends questions already present in Bust of Hera while opening a broader field of narratives. Picasso, whose work has influenced Benlioglu since childhood, remains an important reference for this willingness to transform the familiar. His fragmentation and reconstruction of reality, multiple approaches to the figure, and freedom in building a personal visual language resonate with her own effort to make inherited stories newly legible through thread.
