Fragmented memories

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.