Books Portfolio

Chemigrams book

Transient Impressions

A personal exploration of traces in memory and in material

Photography was around me since childhood, introduced to me through the work of my grandfather, Emil Dura. What began as a familial influence gradually became part of my own artistic and professional life. I grew up surrounded by his small black-and-white prints from weddings, funerals, and daily community life in a small village in northern Romania. These photographs were made between the 1960s and 1980s. His photographs are intimate documents that open conversations about him and the people he photographs.

Last year, during a difficult period when my wife was seriously unwell, I found myself engaging with camera-less processes such as rayograms, chemigrams, and watergrams. It was a way to stay focused and gave me a way to cope. I was attracted by the unpredictability of this process. I was working with light, water, chemistry, time, and chance. Each print is shaped by the chemical reaction of water, darkroom chemistry and light to the photosensitive paper.

I used some of the chemigrams I made to create this handmade book exploring flow, memory, and impermanence. As the project developed, I asked what would happen if I used my grandfather’s photographs in the book. What emerged was an overlap of past and present merged through the process. It transformed the book into a personal vessel of inherited photographs and experimental imagery, creating a space for my virtual collaboration and conversation with my grandfather Emil, who passed away when I was 3 years old.

The blank pages between images are intentional, they allow for a pause to reflect and space to breathe. The dark marks on them are traces of the chemical reaction, presenting like ghostly imprints of thought or memory.  I sequenced his prints and the chemigrams carefully.

The work became an intersection of memory, loss, and material exploration. It honours what is fleeting, embraces what is unpredictable, and invites me to witness a rhythm of life fluid, shifting, like a river.

Etchings book

A collection of my etchings, which were based on my charcoal sketches. I don't like talking about what they mean.

Fragmented memories

An abstract narrative tracing my journey of finding belonging. As an immigrant, my nostalgia flickers between two places: my birthplace, Romania, and my home in Uxbridge.

My memories of Romania are filled with images of childhood, my parents and siblings—yet they also carry echoes of hardship and trauma.

In Uxbridge, my sense of home is rooted in my wife Shaazia, and our daughter Sara. This is where I met Shaazia. This is where Sara was born. Together, we’ve supported her growth. These moments have formed new, invaluable memories.

Belonging becomes for me not fixed in place but something I continue to negotiate. It shifts with time, with memory, with the people who anchor me in the present. My work reflects this ongoing negotiation.

My mind fragments these memories and reassembles them according to how I feel. As I begin to understand the meanings behind these feelings, abstract narratives emerge.

I captured this process in a handmade book, using an SX-70 Polaroid camera. Its unpredictable exposure became a collaborator, mirroring the shifting, uncertain nature of memory itself. The SX-70s and the polaroid film imperfections, its delayed shutters, uneven exposures, soft focus, and colour shift and fading over time resonated with the way memory behaves: selective, emotional, and fading, becoming often unreliable.

This project sits at the intersection of personal history and process-led image-making.

Non places

With this book I am exploring non-place and decay around the area I travel to work.