We like to think we are free. That we make choices, take steps, shape our own futures.
But the past is always there, tugging at us. It lives in our bones, in the stories we didn’t ask to inherit, in the small gestures we repeat without knowing why.
This project began as a question: How much of us is truly ours? I watch my daughter, the way she tilts her head when she’s thinking, the way she curls her fingers when she sleeps. I’ve seen those gestures before—first in my mother, then in myself. I wonder, did she choose them, or did they choose her?
Through self-portraiture, I explore this quiet, relentless thread of inheritance. Three women—my mother, my daughter, and myself—standing at different points in time, yet woven together by something unspoken.
I build the world around us with my hands, crafting objects that carry the weight of memory, symbols of the things passed down through generations.
Some inheritances are obvious—a shape of a face, the colour of hair. Others run deeper.
Fears, habits, the weight of old griefs. The pressure of expectations we never agreed to.
The quiet rebellion of trying to be something different.
This work is an attempt to hold all of it—the history, the love, the resistance.
To step back and see the thread, to name it, and maybe, in the naming, to find a way to loosen its grip.
