Collages from the series “What is land?“

artist residency at Au Brana, France 2024, powered by Culture Moves Europe

The works created during this residency were inspired by the rural landscape of southern France and a personal inquiry into my relationship with land. Through encounters with local people and the surrounding environment, I found myself at a crossroads where language, memory, sacredness, and place began to converge.

I was particularly interested in how we use images and words to frame our experience of landscape — how language shapes our perception, and how we attempt to capture and hold moments through visual means. Using images sourced from old magazines, I explored the relationship between found visuals and the meaning of language, often approaching this investigation with humor. Through a series of miniature collages, I played with literal translations of words that contain “land,” as a way to reflect on my personal relationship with language and how it maps onto place.

In another set of collages, I worked with found paper, band-aid boxes, and actual band-aids — subtle symbols of healing. These materials became a visual gesture toward recovery, echoing a wish to tend to the wounds of land and its layered histories. This process was both playful and tender, rooted in curiosity about how meaning emerges through fragments — of image, of word, of place.