Within Without, 2024
Handmade Accordion Photography Book
637cm x 30cm
Handmade Accordion Photography Book
637cm x 30cm
What’s left behind when something ends, and what begins in that absence. A visual exploration as a personal response to heartbreak, loss, and the complicated process of trying to understand how we hold joy and pain at the same time.
Told through photography, handwritten notes, and collage, the project reflects a nonlinear path through memory and emotion. Some images carry softness, moments of warmth, intimacy, and connection. Others feel distant or fractured, echoing confusion, grief, and detachment. Together, they form a layered portrait of what it means to be vulnerable, to lose, and to begin again, however messily.
The work takes the shape of a handmade double-sided accordion book that opens in three distinct ways, each revealing a different narrative thread. The central opening begins with two split shadows and explores themes of identity, solitude, and self-reckoning. From the left, a sequence unfolds around grief, silence, and the quiet weight of loss. From the right, a parallel journey reveals love, passion, and the tentative return of hope.
As the book expands — up to 15 feet when fully open — it becomes both object and installation, a physical embodiment of emotional complexity, where viewers are invited to walk around, witness, and find their own rhythm through the unfolding.
Much like memory, the work doesn’t follow a straight line. It folds and unfolds, circling back on itself. There are no clean answers, only fragments, reflections of what felt true but never quite lasted. Through the act of making, I try to process those contradictions, not to resolve them but to sit with them. To understand how closeness can become distance, and how pain can quietly give way to hope.
This project isn’t about closure. It’s about presence in the in-between, when nothing feels certain, and yet something is still being built. A place where duality exists, and both love and pain are allowed to speak.
More about this project https://lovewithin-painwithout.cargo.site