Silent Narratives
“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. Solnit R, The Faraway Nearby
How much is our identity shaped by our ancestors, places we were born, mothers, grandmothers, even great grandmothers whom we never met. We inherit skills, repeat behaviours, act like we were thought. Now stretched between two worlds, Poland and England so far apart they feel like different planet. Now I speak a different language, navigate different cultures, built multiple identity? How much was my psyche shaped by absorbing socialist austerity and capitalist abundance. The stories of great grandmothers have nearly vanished from the memory but they formed us.
Our identities are shaped by our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers. I am looking at myself in all of you but I don’t recognise myself
My great grandmother (1888–1968). Her life feels like a slow fade, a woman once present, then thinned by silence. Stories say she was gentle, sang quietly, but lived with depression. The reason she took her life is unknown. What remains is the sense of someone who kept disappearing long before she left.
Silent Narratives
“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. Solnit R, The Faraway Nearby
How much is our identity shaped by our ancestors, places we were born, mothers, grandmothers, even great grandmothers whom we never met. We inherit skills, repeat behaviours, act like we were thought. Now stretched between two worlds, Poland and England so far apart they feel like different planet. Now I speak a different language, navigate different cultures, built multiple identity? How much was my psyche shaped by absorbing socialist austerity and capitalist abundance. The stories of great grandmothers have nearly vanished from the memory but they formed us.
Our identities are shaped by our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers. I am looking at myself in all of you but I don’t recognise myself
My great grandmother (1888–1968). Her life feels like a slow fade, a woman once present, then thinned by silence. Stories say she was gentle, sang quietly, but lived with depression. The reason she took her life is unknown. What remains is the sense of someone who kept disappearing long before she left.
Six generations of women in my family that shaped us.
Gathering these photographs of six generations of women in my family wasn’t a sentimental exercise. It was a confrontation. Laying their faces side by side felt like opening a long‑sealed archive of inherited gestures, quiet resistances, and unspoken wounds. It became a phototherapy, forcing me to recognise how much of myself is built from their experiences, not just their features. In each image I saw a repetition. This cascade of portraits is a study of genetic, emotional, and behavioural inheritance, revealing that what passes between generations is not only bone structure, but survival strategies and silences. Putting these photographs together meant finally acknowledging the lineage I carry, not as nostalgia, but as truth.
Identities shaped by ancestors and places
Growing up in Eastern Europe meant inhabiting a landscape of scarcity, being raised by grandparents, and existing within a social fabric marked by the presence of alcoholism. Cyanotype work evokes shaping identity by female ancestors, garden plants, textures, familiar and embedded. The excavation of family archive and the construction of something new offer more answers but even more questions. Maybe there is something in the act of photography, a way of looking foreword through what already was.