Biography
Seher Erdoğan (b. 1982, she/her) is a Turkish artist, architect, and educator based in Philadelphia. Her sculptural wall pieces combine clay and wool—materials that echo the material culture of her birthplace, Istanbul—and explore the interplay between structure and intuition.
She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Yale University, and practiced in New Haven and New York before shifting her focus to teaching and visual art. After years of experimentation across media, she began to concentrate on her current creative practice in 2019.
Seher has exhibited her work locally and produces commissions for private clients across the United States. She continues to teach architecture at University of Pennsylvania and works out of her studio in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.
Artist Statement
My creative practice is driven by the friction between constructing order and breaking free from it. I explore this tension through patterns that juxtapose oppositional forces and reveal multiplicity within the seemingly singular. This conceptual approach is grounded in material explorations that connect personal history with formal structure.
I make wall pieces pairing clay and wool—materials both timeless and ancient—that connect me to the material culture of my birthplace, Turkey. I grew up surrounded by mesmerizing kilims and exquisite tiles. While my work doesn’t conform to any single tradition, it is grounded in reimagining this heritage.
Each piece begins with the precise construction of a rule-bound, geometric order on a ceramic surface. I then follow intuition to find moments of idiosyncratic expression, iteratively exploring variations in the color and texture of needled or wet-felted wool. This interplay of structure and spontaneity produces a sensory-rich contrast of visual and tactile impressions. I approach oil pastel drawings with a similar sensibility, using the sgraffito technique to complement and expand my sculptural language.
My training and practice as an architect continue to shape how I think about systems, space, and form. Over time, I came to understand the remnants of architectural heritage I studied not only as historical structures, but as charged spaces of longing—sites where memory, imagination, and material intersect. In my work, these echoes of past cultures become frameworks for exploring multiplicity and transformation, offering the viewer a grounded experience that bridges the real and the imagined, the present and the remembered.