London-based Turkish artist and multidisciplinary designer Pınar Şeker is swapping the conventional, white-walled gallery for the striking surroundings of a park this weekend, with a free outdoor exhibition exploring love, pain, memory and human connection.
Titled WE: Love & Pain, Şeker’s one-day contemporary art exhibition will take place on Saturday 5 September beneath a bridge at the Crouch End entrance to Parkland Walk in North London.
Running from 1pm to 6pm, the free event will see Şeker’s colourful paintings and mixed-media works displayed against an unusual backdrop of concrete, greenery and the vibrant graffiti and street art that already covers the bridge.
It is an appropriately unconventional setting for an artist whose work crosses multiple creative disciplines and frequently gives new meaning to objects and materials that might otherwise be discarded.
The exhibition explores the seemingly opposing yet closely intertwined experiences of love and pain, touching on connection, loss, identity, memory and transformation.
Bold colour, expressive figures and symbolism are central to Şeker’s visual language, with the artist particularly interested in the relationship between colour and emotion.
Drawing partly on her own experiences, her work encourages viewers to bring something of themselves to the images too — reflecting on the memories and feelings that particular colours, characters and situations may evoke.
The distinctive characters featured in some of Şeker’s paintings can be playful and unsettling at the same time. One work depicts a melancholy clown-like figure cradling a white cat, while another presents a partially blindfolded woman with a dark-haired cat held against her body, imagery that fits neatly with the exhibition’s exploration of vulnerability, affection and emotional complexity.
From discarded objects to artworks
Sustainability is another important strand running through Şeker’s practice.
Rather than working solely with new materials, she uses recycled and upcycled objects, paper and old frames, transforming things that have lost their original purpose into parts of a new visual narrative.
The approach seems particularly fitting for Parkland Walk itself. The popular North London nature reserve follows the route of a former railway line, while the bridge beneath which the exhibition is being staged has evolved into a colourful canvas for successive generations of graffiti and street artists.
By placing her work there rather than inside a formal gallery, Şeker is also making contemporary art accessible to people who may simply encounter the exhibition while walking through the park.
A multidisciplinary creative career
Şeker has a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and some 15 years of professional experience in the creative industries.
Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting and visual storytelling alongside photography, fashion, graphic design, UI (user interface) and web design.
Those different strands feed into her fine-art practice, where personal experience, emotional storytelling and experimentation with materials come together.
For WE: Love & Pain, that combination will move into the public realm for an afternoon, turning an otherwise everyday passage beneath a North London bridge into a temporary open-air gallery.
Event details
Exhibition: WE: Love & Pain
Artist: Pınar Şeker
Date: Saturday 5 September 2026
Time: 1pm – 6pm
Venue: Parkland Walk, Crouch End entrance, under the bridge near Merro Cafe, London N8 8DD
Admission: Free
Instagram: @pinartcreative_
Website: pasaandpunk.com
