Patchwork Portraits

While rooted in my transition to motherhood, the portrait looks outward to a shared question: What connects us as our lives redraw us? The stitches stand in for the threads we all inherit and make—family ties, cultural memory, language, ritual, and the daily work of tending one another. You can see the marks and small rips the sewing machine left on the negatives; these scars are not mistakes but evidence of contact—traces of pressure, care, and time. Across experiences and cultures, change—whether parenthood or grief, migration or vocation—rearranges our features; we piece ourselves back together with what we share. Identity, then, is not a single, seamless print but a patchwork we keep mending together. In that visible weave—seams, punctures, and all—this self becomes communal: one face among many, held in the same fabric of life.

Sewn negatives of varying formats, printed analog.