“Ongoing Narratives” is a collection of work that fluctuates between traditional photography and photographic collages. In this project, I collect discarded objects and disposable packing materials off the urban streets, such as bubble wrap, foam, cardboard boxes, and scrap pieces of wood from my urban surroundings. I repurpose these unwanted materials to make assemblages and then stage them to create surreal still life and self-portraiture. The objects are assembled, and intertwined, leaning on each other hazardously in front of the camera. I use photography to convey their ephemeral and unstable place in the world, into bodily and psychological landscapes.

The medium of photography provides a stage for a temporary sense of belonging between the fragility and precarity of disposable materials and the ephemeral nature of our existence, reflecting my own experience of emigration. Through the eye of the lens, these disposed and forgotten objects reveal their visceral and phenomenological quality and reevaluates their original intent as being a one-time use object, into a sentient being and otherworldly representation.

Using my own photographs to print on soft materials such as nylon lycra and vinyl, the work adopts a sculptural element within the collage tradition. Printed images are cut-out and layered upon themselves to create a dialogue between soft and hard surfaces. The work travels or fluctuates between two and three dimensions, the real and the virtual, the mundane and the whimsical. These materials lose their original intention and function, because I have created a new world for them to exist within.

Traditional photography and photographic collage size variable. Materials include archival inkjet print, dye sublimation, vinyl, mixed-media.