Spider, Snake, Turtle and Dragon

A collage-based project rooted in a therapeutic process, revisiting childhood memories through family archives, self-portraits and personal materials. By cutting and rearranging images, I explore new ways of seeing the past.

Spider, Snake, Turtle and Dragon is a collage-based project that grew out of a therapeutic process in which I revisited childhood experiences that continued to affect me. Within this process, I worked extensively with Imagery Rescripting, a method that uses imagination to revisit painful memories and give them a different course or outcome. It made me wonder whether something similar could happen within a photograph: if a memory could be revisited and given a different course in imagination, perhaps an image could also be revisited and transformed.

The project brings together new self-portraits, family photographs, letters and other personal materials. It began with three letters I wrote to my father in therapy, which I paired with old family photographs. From there, the archive opened up. I began cutting and rearranging the images by hand with a home printer and a knife, leaving the edges visible. The more I cut and reassembled, the less fixed the memories began to feel, and the more room there was for other perspectives.

The visible cuts are important to me. I do not want the images to look seamless, because memory is not seamless, and neither is the process of revisiting it. A photograph may come from a specific moment, but collage allows different times and places to coexist within the same image. In several works, my present-day body enters photographs from childhood. Within an image I can move a figure, change its scale, place the adult self beside the child self, or bring together images that originally had nothing to do with one another. There is an assertiveness in that gesture: I cannot change what happened, but I can change how I look at it and how it is held in the image.

The spider, snake, turtle and dragon recur as figures and symbols throughout the project. They carry meanings, but those meanings shift as the work develops and as my own relationship to the past changes. I am interested in their ambiguity: something can be protective and threatening, familiar and strange, at the same time.

For me, the process is the work. Cutting, moving and rebuilding are not simply techniques used to arrive at a final image; they are part of what the project is about. Rather than repairing the past or turning it into one coherent story, I return to existing images and memories and see what becomes possible when they are rearranged and brought into new relationships.