In Grace Grit Grin, Ilke Cop explores how the language of femininity has become fixed over time through images and gestures. Her work moves between sculpture, installation, and painting. It begins with damaged porcelain figurines—female forms missing their heads or limbs. Once meant as decoration, they depict women in roles we all too readily recognize: the mother, the caregiver, the lover. Their bodies remain silent, yet their hands continue to speak—small, practiced gestures of giving, bearing, enduring.

Cop chooses not to repair the figurines, but to re-make them. Using polymer clay, she forms new heads and limbs in her own likeness. The faces that emerge are expressive and grotesque, their smiles at once mocking and defiant. That smile—once a symbol of politeness and submission— becomes something else here: a grimace of resistance, a gesture of self-determination.

The resulting sculptures mark the starting point of an intimate process. During photography sessions, the artist adopts the poses of her figures herself. Alone, before the camera, she explores what the body remembers and transmits. In doing so, a dialogue arises between body and image—a repetition, a rehearsal, an invisible performance that helps shape the paintings.

On canvas, various layers merge. The painted bodies reveal the process of reclamation. The nude here is not shown to seduce but to claim space. It is expansive, present, powerful. In the tension between flesh and stone, between vulnerability and stillness, an intense physicality emerges— palpable, yet impossible to contain. The landscape, once so central in Cop’s paintings, is absent. It reappears in the hand-painted panels in which the re-made sculptures are presented, and thus becomes part of the artist’s universe.

The works come into being at a time when Cop is physically and mentally testing her limits.
A transparent yellow glow runs through the work like a pulse. That colour stems from a deeply personal experience: after a brief loss of consciousness, she temporarily lost her vision, regaining it slowly—yellow being the first colour to return. The paintings not only recall that moment, they attempt to translate it; a bodily experience distilled onto canvas.

Grace Grit Grin is not about perfect endings or restored wholes. It is an exploration of how postures, gestures, and images have seeped into our consciousness—and how we might free ourselves from them. Through assembling, distorting, and repeating, Cop exposes how femininity and the body have been shaped, and how they can be reimagined. Not to rewrite history, but to loosen its grip.