Childhood Series

In the process of growing up, one inevitably suppresses childhood perceptions and replaces them with new ‘adult’ perceptions. The way in which a child thinks about things, looks at things, and questions phenomenon, gets suppressed and buried deep into the recesses of the adult conscious mind. These perceptions become secrets of the past, carefully concealed from the secret’s originator. In this series, I am trying to recover the secrets of my childhood. When I look at old family photographs, I can often remember the day when a photo was taken. I use the details that the camera captured (such as clothing, interior spaces, expressions of people’s faces, etc.) to recall and reactivate the five-year-old version of myself and to remember what was it that made me giggle, made my heart race or stir my imagination. I try to go back in time and rewire my thinking process to remember the way I used to be and use these photographs to recover the secrets of my own mind.

As a method of counteracting the process in which my adult perceptions replace those of childhood, I paint childhood reclamations of memory on top of photographed scenes of my past.