Çolak works with an intuitive and improvisational technique in her practice, drawing on the personal, visual, social, and cultural experiences she is frequently exposed to. Through layered visual fragments, she presents her emotional states and the images that remain in her memory and transform over time. Blurring the boundaries between these images—shaped by social rituals, human relationships, the rapidly shifting dynamics of contemporary life, and natural cycles—Çolak freely transforms and reinterprets ordinary objects and situations drawn from everyday life. By distorting the forms of objects and multiplying their meanings, she invites viewers to construct new narratives through their own associations and experiences.
Çolak articulates a pictorial language that is at once unruly and acutely aware of contemporary image circulation. In her works, painting operates on an open field where myth, domesticity, childhood, and the grotesque coexist without hierarchy, where figures appear fragmented, disproportionate, or hybridized, an instability reinforced by a deliberately uneven spatial logic. Mobilizing a painterly register like thin washes coexisting with dense, tactile impastos, and expressive brushwork alternating with almost diagrammatic signs, the presence of childlike motifs, animal bodies, and ambiguous symbols recalls the visual economies of illustration, folklore, and digital collage, aligning the works with contemporary painting’s renewed interest in visibility of making attuned to post-digital seeing.
Probably the best route to decipher those compositions is to accept them as collages assembled from multiple visual regimes—art history, memes, dreams, and personal iconography—without resolving into a single stable meaning; resisting closure, but proposing an associative, scrolling-like experience. Cemile positions painting not as a nostalgic medium but as a responsive surface, capable of absorbing the fractured, image-saturated condition of the present while maintaining a corporeal, sensuous, tactile presence.