Home is my first grave

Home is my first grave reveals home as both refuge and burden—our resting place and our place of suffering. It is where we first learn stillness, and where fragments of us are quietly buried.

Home is my first grave reflects on the paradox of home as both a place of refuge and a site of loss. Every home we first learn is a place to rest, to lay down its weight, to be still. No one knows that it is also where silence gathers, where suffering imprints itself, and where fragments of the self remain buried in memory.

Inspired by the quiet restraint of Danish painters, particularly by works of Vilhelm Hammershøi, Peter Ilsted and Carl Holsøe, this series contemplates home as both cradle and tomb, a place that holds the paradox of origin and ending. The work draws from true stories of those who live with a kind of quiet violence within familiar walls. It speaks of growing up in a home that never broke apart, yet was always breaking—held together by habit, silence, and the fragile pretense of love. The photographs trace the residue of that life: rooms that remember anger, gestures that conceal exhaustion and self-isolation, objects that outlast tenderness. Through the interplay of interiors and the stillness of the human presence, the work explores on how domestic spaces embody both tenderness and quiet ruin, dissolving the boundaries between safety and sorrow quietly.