“Turkish Delight” is a sensorial reconstruction of Istanbul’s confectionary shops and street markets — a place where color, scent, sweetness, and texture converge into one overwhelming experience. This mixed-media collage captures the emotional and sensory abundance of wandering through displays of rosewater candies, pistachio pastries, honeyed cubes, and jewel-toned treats stacked like miniature mosaics. For a neurodivergent mind, this environment becomes a synesthetic field: pinks smell floral, greens feel warm, sugars hum with color, and everything glows with sensory intensity.
The vertical composition echoes a tall shop window or narrow market corridor. Layered collage, paper-mâché, torn fragments, and saturated pigment recreate the density of visual information characteristic of Istanbul’s bazaars. Nothing sits flat or still: shapes overlap like stacked delights; textures mimic powdered sugar, soft pastry, glazed surfaces, and crinkled wrappers. The piece balances the sweetness of the subject matter with a deeper emotional undertone — the human warmth, the buzz of conversation, the intimate joy of tasting something handmade and culturally rooted.
In this work, the artist is not documenting Turkish sweets; she is archiving the emotional imprint they leave. It’s the sudden comfort of soft pastel tones, the crowded shelves of color, the sensory overwhelm softened by warmth and hospitality. “Turkish Delight” becomes an emotional artifact — a record of sweetness not as a flavor, but as a place, a moment, a feeling carried in the body.
As part of the Sensory Archives series, this piece expands the project into culinary memory, proving that place is not only architecture and geography, but taste, scent, and the intimate sensory experiences that color our travels.
