As a designer, the limitation of thinking and making time was the biggest challenge. I chose to follow my hands rather than my mind, the need of my hands to create. From the beginning, the creative process became deeply personal and intertwined with reflections on family, ancestry, trauma, and identity. The struggle to find space for my female body and voice, in society, in everyday relationships, and within myself, brought all those thoughts about my two sisters and my grandmother, who embody care, strength, and generational connection.

I started by working with yarn and threading it on a piece of clothing that reminds me of my grandmother’s handmade blankets. As I created lines, I found myself reflecting on why I enjoy knitting so much and what connection I share with the older generations in my family through knitting. Knitters often disappear into their minds, and knitting becomes storytelling, repetitive, meditative, and finally healing. The color RED was a strong connection between Anu’s and my work. It became a color that carried the themes of bloodlines, anger, menstruation, resistance, and violence. It is a color that both wounds and heals.

During the playing time, I knitted, painted, created holes, and nets. I worked with the knowledge of my hands and some of the thoughts that I shared before.

Through the process, different images of femininities emerged, from the mother, the grandmother, the sisters, to the bodybuilder Lady Lisa Lyon. Especially the last one was the figure who enters my work as a powerful symbol of resistance, strength, and transformation. She embodies a defiance of traditional gender norms and challenges the stereotypes imposed on the female body. By bringing her presence into the costume, we could explore the healing process through a body of empowerment.