I’m starting to forget

This project is an attempt to capture the moment when the memory of a loved one begins to decay not abruptly, but gradually. Initially, you recall individual things: objects, scents, gestures, everyday details connected to the person who has passed. Then, these fragments begin to repeat, shift, and lose clarity until the person’s image dissolves into a smudge and disappears entirely. In the end, nothing remains—only the feeling of profound loss.

The image of a grandmother was chosen for a reason. For many, a grandmother served as a guide from childhood into the adult world, a person connected to deep childhood joys and sorrows. My farewell to my grandmother was like a farewell to a lost childhood—something difficult, and sometimes impossible, to recall in detail.

Each page in this series is dedicated to one object connected to the memory of my grandmother: pies, jars of tomatoes, sunflowers, embroidery patterns. Initially, the object reads almost like a photograph, but with each new impression, it becomes increasingly distorted, accumulated, darkened, and transforms into an amorphous stain. Thus, the memory ceases to be an image and becomes a trace of loss.

The project is less about a specific grandmother than it is about the mechanism of forgetting. It explores how love and memory try to hold onto a person through details, but over time, only objects remain—and even they gradually lose their form.

Engraving is created by removing material: the image appears not through addition, but through subtraction. This is directly connected to the theme of memory, which also preserves an image not completely, but fragmentarily—by «cutting away» the superfluous from memory. Multiple impressions amplify this idea: each new layer alters the memory, erases it, and drifts away from the original image.

The project culminates in a light source—a lampshade in which the memory of a person is preserved not as a face, but as a warm, shimmering presence of something familiar.