Kodachrome

Through photography and collage, I rework a portrait of my Dead partner, exploring Death as transformation and our interconnected threads connecting us to one another and the natural world.

KODACHROME

Two months before my partner, Sidikie Died, I took a portrait of him. Since his Death, I have returned to this image repeatedly, using it as a way to continue a dialogue with him, a conjuring of sorts. Through photography, collage, and the integration of found materials, I am transforming and bringing a new life to his portrait, layering it with landscapes, colors, leaves, fish bones, and other fragments of the natural world.

Sidikie Died suddenly in a river in his home country, Sierra Leone, where we met and worked together. He has always loved this land and felt intrinsically pulled to nature, to the ocean, to the horizon. He was always inherently aware of his mortal self.

Since his Death, my relationship with this landscape has deepened and become further intertwined with my relationship to him. I take long walks in the forest, as we used to, and collect pieces of the Earth. I put my hands in the ocean, in the dirt, I let the sun stain me. I find myself feeling closer to him in these natural crevices, and so I gather materials, expose my prints to the elements and allow the landscape to enter the work, to blend together, to influence patterns of color. The waves, wind, shifting sand, and patterns of light influence the constant rebirth of reworking this portrait. Leaves that have been consumed, decaying, or caught somewhere between life and decomposition become part of this process, reflecting my interest in the liminal spaces between life and Death, presence and absence, and becoming and unbecoming.

As I co-create with this landscape, it’s impossible to ignore its own vulnerability and transience. Just within the capital, Freetown, which is surrounded by a national park, loss of the forests and natural habitats are visible and ongoing. I cannot separate its beauty from its suffering and fragility, or my own experience of loss from the continual transformation of the world around me. It becomes inherent that there is always a duality we coexist with: life and Death, creation and destruction, love and grief, the undercurrents of memory that live in parallel to the present moment.

Through this work, I am exploring the possibility that Death is not an ending but a transformation, and that everything exists in relation to everything else. I am drawn to the idea that, in Dying, we return to source; that there is a spiritual dimension woven into the physical world, omnipresent yet not always visible to us. Light becomes one way of exploring this relationship, allowing its patterns and interactions to enter the images as something tangible that might also evoke the intangible.

Water, too, has taken on a profound significance. It is the place where Sidikie died, but also a threshold, a portal, an entry point into the unknown. Within this landscape, I have become drawn to images of boats and sailboats, which recur throughout the work, sometimes existing as photographs in their own right and sometimes entering into the collages. I see them as vessels of transition, suggesting the possibility of movement between worlds, of a journey continuing beyond what we can see. They become a thread connecting the images, holding the possibility of passage between the living and the Dead, the physical and the spiritual.

By repeatedly altering Sidikie’s portrait and bringing it into dialogue with the landscape, I am searching for ways to transcend the finality of Death and imagine other realms of possibility. Through layering and overlaying images, I am creating a space in which different worlds can merge, where the boundaries between the visible and invisible become less distinct. This process is also changing my own relationship with the landscape, with grief, with Sidikie. As I continue to explore and become more deeply connected to this place, I continue to discover new ways of knowing Sidikie and of understanding my relationship with him beyond his physical absence.

The suddenness of his Death was so jolting that I was left with something I could not fully comprehend, something I needed to release into another form. This work has become an ongoing way of processing grief, remaining in dialogue with Sidikie, and allowing that relationship to continue evolving. It is both an intimate process of mourning and an exploration and honoring of the interconnected web of life, in which everything is continually transforming and nothing exists entirely apart from anything else.

The more I work on this project the more it influences how I see and interact with the world around me. As I continue developing this theme, I aim to engage more with water and decomposing matter.

This project takes its title from Paul Simon’s Kodachrome, a song and artist Sidikie loved. The song explores how memory alters reality. Its joy, nostalgia, and quirkiness evoke something of his spirit, while its associations with color, memory, and the act of looking back inform the work’s visual and emotional language. For me, Kodachrome holds the contradictions at the heart of grief: the pain of absence alongside the persistence of love, the finality of Death alongside the cycle of life.