The project is a diptych of photographs taken the winter before last.
Evening, the cold bites—especially out in the countryside—and underfoot, the frozen lampposts are covered in intricate ice formations.
Concept
The work is based on a simple natural phenomenon—frost patterns often resemble the shapes of plants, which are usually named accordingly: ice ferns. I was interested not only in the visual similarity between them but also in what lies behind it. The inanimate «remembers» the living and reproduces its form, even when the living thing is gone or dormant.
The diptych is constructed as a short story about this memory: from presence to imprint.
First Frame: Presence.
Real fern fronds are frozen in ice, and frost is already beginning to spread in crystals around them. The living thing and its icy double exist simultaneously. The leaf is still dark, fresh, but beside it, its pale copy is already emerging, as if the cold is stripping away its vibrancy.
It is not over yet, but it is no longer alive.
Frame Two: The Imprint.
The leaves are gone. All that remains is a frosty pattern on the glass, yet it replicates them with astonishing accuracy: the same rhythm, the same branching, the same pinnation.
It is no longer the plant itself, but the way it has been remembered.
«Memory of Form» is a work about the traces left by living things and about what nature preserves in its archives of the vanished. Ice preserves, it does not kill; it inscribes memory in its patterns, leaving behind a message. And perhaps everything we lose continues to exist somewhere—a weightless outline appearing on glass.
