Powerlines

Power Lines explores grief, ecology, and cultural hybridity through photography and collage. Created beyond boarders, it reflects on personal and collective loss, interconnection, and the quiet power of care and continuity.

Power Lines is an ongoing photographic and collage-based project that began in 2024, during a period of transition and mourning. The work unfolds between Malaysia and Turkey—two places that held me as I navigated loss, movement, and reflection. During this time, both of my grandmothers passed away within three months of each other.

Their deaths marked more than personal grief. They signaled the quiet disappearance of a language, rituals, and stories that once shaped how I understood belonging. Culture is sustained through our elders, their ways of being, their wisdom, their care. To lose them felt like the interruption of a current, as if the invisible lines that once carried memory and meaning had gone still.

As I moved through this intimate mourning, the world itself seemed to reflect a collective one. The genocide in Palestine had been ongoing for 6+ months. I could not turn away from the collective grief. It became impossible to separate personal grief from a wider grief for humanity. That awareness became woven into the work, shaping it into a reflection on how personal loss and global suffering intersect within shared systems of disconnection.

During this time, I turned toward nature as a form of healing. Working outdoors and documenting the experience through my lens became a form of grounding and care. Photographing the land, light, and sky became a ritual of attention, a way to remember reciprocity and the living systems that hold us. Power lines, recurring throughout the series, became both symbol and structure: fragile yet enduring, visible reminders of interdependence.

Alongside the photographs, I began making collages that reimagine family photographs through patterns in origami. The use of origami patterns acts as a symbolic gesture of mixing and transformation. As a TCK (third culture kid), these patterns express the layered nature of identity: the folding and unfolding of cultures, environments, and values that shape who we are. The merging of family imagery with these visual forms reflects the fluidity of belonging and the beauty of hybridity as a living process.

Power Lines is, at its core, a meditation. The series weaves together themes of grief, ecology, and cultural hybridity, when the world feels increasingly fractured. In tracing these invisible lines - between people, places, and histories - the work becomes a quiet act of resistance: an insistence that power, in its truest sense, lies in empathy, reciprocity, and the enduring capacity to connect. It is an archive of loss and resilience, mapping the unseen lines - familial, cultural, and planetary - that sustain us. Ultimately, the project asks how we might restore our relationship with one another and the natural world when power is redefined not as domination, but as care, continuity, and the courage to remain connected.