What We Carry Back

This work began as a way of looking. Over time, it became a way of remembering—of understanding how memory shapes identity, and how belonging is carried between women and across generations.

What We Carry Back began as a way of looking. Over time, it became a way of remembering - of trying to understand how memory shapes identity, and how belonging is carried across generations.

Centred on the women in my maternal family in Tamil Nadu, the work brings together contemporary colour photographs with family albums, handwritten records and vernacular photographs preserved across decades. Each year, my grandmother and her daughters return to our ancestral home for my grandfather’s death anniversary. The gathering becomes a space in which memory is repeated, retold and lived again.

The archive is not treated as fixed historical evidence. I am interested in the ways photographs gather meaning through use: creases, fading, worn album pages, handwritten dates and accidental marks all become part of how the family remembers itself. One handwritten sheet, maintained by my grandmother, records the birth dates of her children and remains the only family-held record of those births. These materials sit alongside contemporary photographs of the same women returning, cooking, sharing food, caring for one another and moving through spaces they have known since childhood.

The project considers what photographs preserve, but also what they fail to contain. The women appear in formal studio portraits, ceremonies and family photographs, yet their lives extend beyond the roles those images seem to fix. Returning to these photographs now allows me to look again at the women I grew up around, not only as mothers, daughters or wives, but as individuals whose relationships with one another continue to shape how memory is carried.

By moving between inherited images and photographs I make in the present, What We Carry Back explores photography as a form of inheritance - something handled, questioned, reinterpreted and carried forward. Belonging is not inherited whole; it is built together.