My relationship with my mother has always been complicated. All my life, I’ve felt like I’m not enough. So, how does a daughter used to the bitterness of her relationship with her mother suddenly decides to photograph her at arm’s length and submit her to her creative will?
"Fragile" is my exploration of memory, legacy, and transformation. This process is not simply about preserving memory but about transforming it — a dialogue between past and present, between me and my mother. How do we absorb and reinterpret the figures that shape us? And how does a mother—as a person and as a symbol—exist beyond the expectations imposed on her?
I study the image of my mother through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Working with Polaroid photos and fragments of paintings that both of us love, I create collages that preserve and recreate. By cutting, layering, and drawing over my mother’s portraits and rearranging the fragments of the paintings she taught me to appreciate, I enter into a dialogue with time, memory, and identity — returning the image to her, but transformed, filled with my artistic vision. "Fragile" is a continuous flow of images, feelings, and heritage passed from generation to generation. It is something that originates from one source but does not remain unchanged. I reflect on her not only as a mother, but as a woman. My mother has her own independent story, inner world, and experiences. This mirrors the natural process of growing up, when children begin to see their parents differently, more complexly, more deeply.
Polaroids as a medium symbolize the tangibility of memory for me. They smell like childhood. My parents photographed me, and it felt like magic. By cutting them and reassembling them anew, I seem to be saying: “Time changes us, but I can still influence how we are remembered.” This project is also about how the image of a loved one continues to live and transform within ourselves. It’s my way of saying: "I see you, I understand, I recreate you to find you again, no matter what". In the dialogue between what has been passed down to me and what I create myself, I am reborn and take root. I take control of the image of the woman I’ve spent my life trying to understand. This act questions inherited notions of motherhood, daughterhood, and selfhood, revealing fragile layers of love, distance, and recognition.
