"Love Within, Pain Without" (2024) is a manifestation of the layers that define us — love, grief, identity, and the fragile hope that emerges from deep pain. It traces the fractured contours of life’s emotional terrain, where the delicate interplay of joy and sorrow exists in parallel, constantly reshaping one another. The project is not simply a collection of photographs; it’s a narrative of intimate moments, a reflection of personal upheavals, and an ongoing quest to understand the complexities of human connection.
When I look back at the moments of vulnerability in my life, I can’t help but reflect on how love often felt like a dream, one I’d chase after and ultimately wake from. These emotions — the warmth of affection, the harshness of loss — tend to merge, like threads crossing through each experience, leaving behind remnants of joy, confusion, and everything in between. The project becomes a way of grappling with the uncertainties and contradictions that color our journeys. Much like my earlier work, this exploration isn't a neat, packaged narrative — it’s raw, unfiltered, and chaotic, much like the journey itself.
In this unfolding structure, I seek to capture the nonlinear experience of heartbreak and healing. There’s an undercurrent of struggle in these photographs, a quiet questioning of what it means to lose oneself and find something new in the aftermath. It’s a space where hope doesn’t emerge fully formed, but as a flicker, as something tentative. The handwritten notes, textures, and found objects I’ve incorporated are not merely aesthetic additions; they are physical manifestations of the internal dialogue, of how memory, love, and grief are entangled and remembered in fragments. Each fold in the book represents another layer of this complexity, where past and present exist simultaneously, and where emotions constantly shift and reshape as I attempt to capture them.
"Love Within, Pain Without" doesn’t offer resolution, it reflects the messiness and impermanence of life. There is no single narrative thread, but rather an embrace of dualities, where the moments of pain hold the seeds of growth, and love is both a comfort and a source of deep vulnerability. This project is my way of making sense of it all, and offering it to others not just as art but as a shared, lived experience.
More about this project https://lovewithin-painwithout.cargo.site