The project consists of three collages placed onto fragments of pear tree trunks taken from a tree still growing in the yard of my family home. The tree functions not only as a personal marker of place, but as a living archive — a body that has absorbed seasons and time through its silent growth. Each work is constructed from photographic images transferred onto sections of the wood. The first collage draws from my family archive, the second from found photographs of an American family from the 1950s purchased in New York, and the third from images in The Beijing Silvermine, a project by Thomas Sauvin. Bringing together archives from three distant geographies — Bulgarian, American, and Chinese — the work approaches memory as a material that migrates across cultures and histories. Rather than preserving the photograph as a stable document, I use cheap photocopies that wrinkle, distort, and fragment onceadhered to the bark. The images collapse into the surface, forming a collective skin that resembles charred or carbonized wood. Only through prolonged looking do individual faces and gestures begin to emerge.
What interests me is not the singular photograph, but the way many images dissolve into a shared material presence — an obscure monument of intimacy and loss. Memory here is not preserved through clarity but through erosion, as if remembrance survives precisely by becoming matter. The tree becomes a conduit between registers: earth and sky, root and atmosphere, burial and elevation. The work asks whether information can persist through transformation — whether something essential remains even as images decay into texture, into ash-like sediment. Human memory rarely survives intact; it settles instead into matter, into residues and surfaces. Like the ashes contained in ancient urns described by Thomas Browne, fragments endure long after the names they once belonged to have faded. What remains is not the image itself, but the persistence of its trace.

collage over tree trunks (variable size)