SILENCE

Silence (2017) is a meditation on identity, memory, and the unspoken forces that shape a life from its earliest years. At its centre lies the weight of a truth that could not be voiced, a truth concealed within the ordinary rhythms of family life. In that quiet, I learned to move through the world carrying an unnameable burden. It would later take its name as incestuous rape. It lived as a shadow woven into the fabric of my being, shaping the way I saw, touched, and trusted. The silence surrounding it was not merely an absence of sound, but a structure: a carefully maintained space in which truth could not enter. Working with scanned photographs from my family archive, I reprint, re-age, and reconstruct them into handmade collages. This slow and deliberate process transforms the family portrait, once a seamless image of unity, into something fractured and unsettled. Through layering, obscuring, and reconfiguring, I invite the photographs to bear the marks of rupture, revealing the tensions concealed beneath their surface. These altered images become haunted artefacts, carrying the contradictions of tenderness and harm, intimacy and fracture. By reworking these documents, I reclaim them from their role as silent witnesses, allowing them instead to participate in the telling. My practice is informed by Roland Barthes’ reflections in Camera Lucida, particularly his notion of the punctum: the detail that pierces the image and unsettles its apparent certainty. Through intervention and collage, I create new puncta, moments where the photograph’s surface gives way to deeper undercurrents, hinting at what was present but never acknowledged. These disruptions act as quiet disclosures, revealing without fully exposing, speaking through suggestion rather than declaration. Influenced by the visual languages of John Stezaker and Amy Friend, I use collage to inhabit the space between revelation and concealment. The works hold both familiarity and estrangement, carrying the weight of what they depict and what they omit. Family photographs, traditionally understood as records of belonging and continuity, become sites of ambiguity where memory, longing, and loss converge. Silence is an act of reclamation and transformation. It is a means of inhabiting my own history without erasure, of giving form to what was once confined to secrecy. In these collages, absence becomes articulate and the fragments of a fractured past are reassembled into something that can be seen, if not fully known. The work dwells in the space where beauty and pain remain inseparable, where photographs speak what words could not, including the truth that was once unspeakable.