A GIRL FROM THAT TOWN

For the girl from that town. The girl who grew up in a slaughterhouse.The girl who was taught to be strong. The summer she lived. Her pale skin and pink cheeks. Her fragmented memories and buried dreams. The girl who never left...

The work explores the complexities of fragmented memories, personal identities, and the surreal nature of girlhood, finally aiming to re-visualise my girlhood and the contrasting elements that shaped it.

Clashes and contrasts between the beauty and the grotesque, the sparkly dreams and crushing realities of my childhood of growing up in a slaughterhouse in my adolescent years of trying to reject that part of me are showcased through a body of work that is simultaneously real and artificial.

Whether it be in the colour, juxtaposing locations, or the girls themselves, all the images carry an element of artificialness as an expression of remembering the fragments of my girlhood.

Crushed Blossoms

In the hazy corridors of memory, where shadows intertwined with the lingering scent of blood, I traced back the fragmented tales of my youth—a time enmeshed in the grim reality of a family trade stained with the essence of death.

I undressed, my innocence draped upon the hooks at the slaughterhouse. My bare feet touched the cold, slick floors, merging with the lingering scent of blood and steel.

Memories, like fractured reflections in a tarnished mirror, reveal a girl forged amid the clatter of steel and the heavy breath of cattle, where her dreams sparkled like distant stars against a backdrop of raw meat and butchered flesh.

In that haze of adolescence, I yearned to belong somewhere beyond the confines of our grim tableau. Yet, the stench of raw meat clung to my skin, a reminder of the chasm between my world and others. My isolated refuge was but a feeble attempt to separate myself from the grotesque spectacle that shaped my identity.

Strength was the anthem of our household—a shield against vulnerability, a mask to hide the disquiet beneath. Yet, beneath this facade, a quiet yearning stirred—a desire to embrace vulnerability amidst the relentless clangour of heavy machinery.

Behind closed doors, I witnessed my mother’s tears, her muffled sobs echoing, concealed from us. Guilt, sorrow, and anger mingled within me, like drops of rain upon tainted skin. The contradiction of strength and vulnerability, etched into the marrow of my being. Amidst the veiled charade, I yearned for honesty, for us to shed our armour and reclaim the parts of ourselves obscured by the shadows of stoicism.

The slaughterhouse was more than a palace of blood and gore—it was a crucible of paradoxes, where life and death met, where resilience clashed with longing, and where echoes of unspoken truths reverberated against the clamour of machinery. The girl emerged from the fragmented mirror, not unscathed but shaped—I had found the echoes of vulnerability—fragile and beautiful like crushed blossoms.

The grotesqueness that shaped me, now co-existed with such beauty.