Tillsammans och Isär
(together and apart) 2025

Tillsammans och Isär (together and apart) is a response to the relationship I have to my matrilineal Swedish heritage. It contemplates the nature of family and home and how our cultural inheritances shape the ways we navigate what it means to belong.

The project negotiates between memory and fabulation, stuck between the desire to fix one’s recollections of the past and their inevitable unravelling. Set against the vivid Australian landscape surrounding Gimuy, Far North Queensland, the work attempts to address the intimate strangeness of being both at home and removed from it.

Guided by the curiosity of my own lived experience as someone whose identity is given through a certain displacement, I explore the dualistic nature of the image as both creator and destroyer. I seek connection through the process of making but am only ever afforded an ersatz kind of relation to this other homeland. One mixed with a tender longing but delineated by loss. Shadowed by that aching question asking what if we had stayed? Who would I have been? The self that never happened seems to burn somewhere in the body, the effigy of some ectopic past.

I think now about the experience of my mother in contrast to my own. How my sister, who no longer speaks to her family, complicates the picture. The unseen but somehow inherited anxieties that echo through the generations. I wanted to create images that exist in this space of partial belonging suspended somewhere between reality and imagination. Through the act of photographing my mother and myself we enter a speculative narrative where image and memory become each other’s shadow.