Love letters to the Adriatic

My collages integrate familial and well-known figures’ photographs into two-dimensional watercolour scenes. Interior spaces and outdoor landscapes are places where memories and media coexist. In some scenes, relatives loiter in open fields with celebrated authors. Ancestral history is estranged and abstracted. The scenes are pulled from my mother’s memories in Croatia, which was then a part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Personal history becomes a playground for imagination. As it does not involve me directly, I view memories of lost relatives as fictional scenes of mythical characters. Cutting and pasting these figures into bright spaces supposes they can be reborn into entirely new and fictitious narratives that I construct for my own amusement. The recurring motif throughout the works is the colour blue; sky blue depicts a washed out azure horizon, whilst royal blue, the colour of lapis lazuli, is a colour that I associate deeply with the sea. The collages can be read as love letters to the Adriatic, the sole force shielding the central Dalmatian archipelago from immediate destruction for centuries. In the ocean one finds freedom and eternity, a feeling I hope to encapsulate.

Designed by Sophie Wishart