This piece is one of my favorites, not only for its form but for the memory it unlocks. When I look at it, I am carried back to the photographs I grew up with. The family albums carefully tucked away, the magazines stacked in our living room or left to gather dust in the garage. Those images were my first education, my earliest entry into visual storytelling. Before I knew I was becoming a photographer, I was already learning to see.
My parents, both medical doctors, never thought of themselves as stylish, but to me they were, in the quiet, unassuming ways that only children notice. Their gestures, their clothes, the everyday textures of our home became a kind of backdrop I still return to in my work. The Alchemy draws from that inheritance. It carries the weight of memory, the familiarity of an archive both intimate and ordinary, transformed into something new.
The work is suspended between lament and becoming: a face serene yet heavy with the unseen, hair sculpted into geometry that is at once adornment and restraint. It is a meditation on transformation, on how grief, memory, and endurance can be reshaped into something luminous. In that sense, it mirrors my own journey, the alchemy of turning childhood impressions, family histories, and fragments of sorrow into art.
In this piece, as in much of what I create, I see not just the surface but the continuum, the way the past still flickers through the present, how the images I once flipped through on living room floors live inside my hands today. The Alchemy belongs to that lineage, one piece in a larger story, and one of many more I am yet to make.
