Becoming Herstory

This is a photographic meditation on the idea of home, belonging, and migration. I moved to the UK 20 years ago as a child and this move created a physical and cultural rupture with my family and Polish society. This project explores the concept of home through memory and fractured nostalgia rather than through a physical place. Using self-portraiture, I wear my ancestors’ clothes, connect with my family heritage and highlight the war-torn complexity of Eastern Europe. The images were inspired by conversations with my mum and family photographs. My mum spent years bringing clothes and glassware from Poland to the UK, as these enabled her to maintain a physical bond with Polish culture. Keeping them facilitated a connection with the past and helped us cultivate the feeling of home, something that we struggled to achieve whilst living in the UK. Amongst many others, I include my mum’s first kitchen curtains, a handmade sheep coat, Coca Cola towels won in a radio competition, a New Years’ Eve collar smuggled from Thailand, and my mum’s dowry, all of which my mum has kept in our house over the years. These self-portraits function as multidimensional spaces, combining voices of women in my family, reflecting on how the past influences the present, and enabling the idea of “home” to be something I am able to carry with me. I “wear” and “perform” my family history and reflect on how the memories and experiences of women in my family have shaped my identity.