Sky Ece Ulusoy: Recipient of the 2026 DesignTO Emerging Artist/Designer Award 

Each year, the DesignTO Awards celebrate designers whose work expands how we think about design and its role in shaping the world around us. Through our Awards Recipient Spotlight series, we’re highlighting the artists and designers behind this year’s winning projects.

How do we carry memory through space?

For artist and architectural designer Sky Ece Ulusoy, this question shapes both her practice and her DesignTO Award winning exhibition ‘Invisible Weight’, presented at the 2026 DesignTO Festival at STACKT Market. The work explores the unseen forces that shape emotional and mental experience, inviting visitors into a space where fragility and resilience exist in tension.

“When attendees encounter ‘Invisible Weight’, I want them to experience the often unseen forces that shape our emotional and mental lives,” Ulusoy explains. “The installation is designed as a space to feel the tension between fragility and resilience.”

Suspended fabric, weighted by shifting pockets of sand, responds to movement and light. As visitors move through the installation, shadows shift and surfaces subtly transform, creating a sense of instability that mirrors internal emotional states. Rather than offering resolution, the work creates space for recognition. “I hoped attendees would inhabit the piece rather than just observe it,” she says. “To feel the tension above them, and to encounter a moment where the private becomes shared.”

Ulusoy’s practice sits at the intersection of art and architecture, two fields she sees as deeply interconnected. “I am a Turkish artist and architectural designer based in Toronto,” she says. “I work as an Intern Architect alongside my artistic practice, and I see these two fields as deeply interconnected parts of how I think and create.”

Her work spans architecture, public art, and research, but is unified by a consistent focus on memory. She is particularly interested in how lived experiences are reconstructed, fragmented, and translated into space. “In my artistic practice, I explore individual and collective memory,” she explains. “I’m interested in how memory is shaped, altered, and spatialized. How it can be both deeply personal and collectively shared.”

Unlike a single defining moment, Ulusoy’s path into art and design developed gradually, shaped by observation and instinct. “I don’t think I had a single, clear ‘eureka’ moment,” she says. “It was a gradual realization that came from how I naturally responded to the world around me.”

Drawing and making became a way of processing the environments she moved through, and over time, she began to understand that art and architecture offered a shared language. “I realized that I didn’t have to choose between art and design. I could work between them.”

What solidified that direction were the moments when her work connected with others. “Seeing people move through a space or engage with an installation, and witnessing how it could affect them, made me realize the impact that art and design can have,” she says. “What stayed with me even more were the conversations that followed.”

That emphasis on experience and interaction continues to shape her evolving practice. During her early studies, Ulusoy was exposed to a wide range of mediums, from photography to printmaking. Yet regardless of the format, she found herself pushing toward spatial expression. “No matter the medium, I was often turning projects into installations or spatial experiences,” she recalls.

This instinct eventually became foundational. Rather than committing to a single material or method, she allows each project to determine its own form. “I approach each project by asking what it needs,” she says. “Allowing the concept, site, and context to determine the materials and form.” Her background in architecture expanded this approach further, giving her the tools to work at larger scales and to engage directly with public space. Over time, her work has shifted from smaller explorations to immersive, site-specific installations.

At the core of Ulusoy’s work is a deeply personal relationship to making. “Making is an essential part of how I understand myself,” she says. “It’s the way I slow down, focus, and begin to make sense of what I’ve gone through.” Through this process, memory becomes something tangible. Something that can be revisited, reshaped, and shared. “I often try to translate something very specific and personal into a form that feels open and accessible,” she explains. “So that others can enter the work and find their own meanings within it.”

Ulusoy’s influences come from both her immediate community and a broader lineage of artists and thinkers. “I feel so lucky to be surrounded by an amazing community of friends who are artists and creators,” she says. “We grow together, learning from and cheering each other on.” She also points to local mentors such as An Te Liu, Ed Pien, and Elle Flanders as formative influences, alongside international artists including Olafur Eliasson, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Refik Anadol. Their explorations of space, perception, and materiality continue to inform her thinking.

Although she had followed DesignTO for years, this marked her first time participating in the Festival. “I had never been directly involved until this year,” she says. “I was always inspired by the diversity of work and the creativity on display.” Being part of the festival was both unexpected and meaningful. “I feel so grateful, surprised, and truly amazed to be included in the festival,” she shares. “It’s an incredible experience to contribute to a community I have admired for so long.”

For Ulusoy, DesignTO represents more than an exhibition platform. It is a space for connection and exchange. “DesignTO is important because it brings people together around ideas, creativity, and dialogue,” she says. “It creates opportunities to engage with art and design in unexpected ways.”

In ‘Invisible Weight’, those ideas come together in a quiet but powerful way. The installation does not attempt to define experience, but instead opens a space for reflection. It asks us to consider the invisible forces we carry, and how they shape the way we move through the world.