Traces in Blue

 

I’ve photographed places that hold personal and cultural significance to me across the UK and Cyprus. Growing up as a Cypriot in diaspora, I’ve often felt a tension between distance and belonging. For this project, I wanted to reflect on what heritage means when it’s shaped by displacement, memory, and emotion, rather than solely by place or tradition.  

To explore this, I reintroduced archival photographs from my family albums, placing them in conversation with my recent images of landscapes and spaces connected to my heritage. I’m interested in how memory is preserved, altered, or even lost across generations, and how photography can be a way of bridging those gaps. These archival images act as visual traces of the past, and by incorporating them into new work, I aim to question how heritage continues to evolve.  

 

I chose to work with cyanotypes because I’m drawn to their materiality and hands-on process. The deep blue of the print, paired with its unpredictability, mirrors the emotional and elusive nature of memory. Cyanotypes also give me the freedom to experiment—layering, reworking, and physically engaging with the surface of the image.  

Through double exposure, I’ve printed my own drawings onto some of the cyanotypes. These lines serve multiple symbolic purposes: they act as roots, connecting different layers of time, and as stitches, binding past to present, presence to absence.  

This work is both an emotional and material exploration of inherited identity. It reflects my desire to make sense of my heritage not just through imagery, but through the physical process of making. It’s a way of honouring the fragments, reconnecting what’s been separated, and acknowledging that heritage is not fixed—it’s something we continuously shape, question, and carry.