When I first considered turning my practice into a research project, I couldn't quite understand how can making images be research?

A few years later I realise that my practice has always been a research, however, the question that it follows is not something that can easily be asked. To uncover and answer the question, I utilise image-making with specific mediums and intuitive practices.

The reading, the thinking, the discovery happen because the unconscious is allowed to become an image first. How old is this film? Where was it made? What do I feel drawn to capture on it, where and when? These are not random choices; they are the formative steps toward uncovering that which will continue the individual enquiry towards THE truth, which is personal and meaningful to you first and foremost. It is from this point —this personal, deeply felt clarity —that the shared truth can emerge.

The point of any investigation is the positioning of the self at the midpoint of the pendulum, observing the movement towards both the future and the past. Any point in time was once the future, and every point will become the past, even the one that is being experienced right now.

Sometimes you take a shot of a street lamp that caught your eye on a German-made expired film without much thinking, only to find yourself later reading the brief history of the Russian Revolution, German settlements in Ukraine and their faith before and during WWII. The collective unconscious intersects with the individual expression and guides the mind towards further questions.

You pick up a random film at the camera fair, which turns out to be made in Ukraine, cut and sold under a different name in the UK. You shoot it with a wide-angle lens made in the USSR, struggling to focus it because it's unscrewing from the adaptor. You find analogous lines everywhere, your process becomes your 'thinking in action'. The question clarifies: so why are the areas of Ukraine where I come from so different, beyond the opinion I already hold on this matter?

Eventually, you find an old photo of your school with a German translation. You remember it was a school for girls when it was founded. You remember that the school in Rabka was also initially opened as a girls' school, before being hijacked and turned into an SS training facility.

You conclude, once again, that the metanarrative that previously held you in a worldview that felt safe enough to exist in expands when your mind is ready for it. Moreover, the mind is guided by the image to do so effectively, helping you bypass bias and allow truly new information to enter it.