Where Deer Fly and Stones Cry

The series weaves an autofictional journey confronting rigid binary, religious, and patriarchal structures. Drawing from a legend of a shape-shifting stone and a place called ‘Paradise’, where I grew up, and where surface beauty masked deeper tensions.

WHERE DEER FLY AND STONES CRY is a photographic reinterpretation of memories, stories, and a local legend that gave the place where I grew up the name ‘Paradise’. According to the legend, a stone changed its shape overnight after the Holy Family rested upon it. This quiet transformation becomes a key to questioning the binary, religious, and patriarchal structures of my origins. Through my artistic process, the work looks beneath the seemingly paradisiacal surface that masks the deeper tensions of a society shaped by addiction and suicide. It explores the challenges of living beyond social norms and gives voice to my experience as a non-binary person.

The series unfolds through photographs, drawings by my grandfather, and a short story. A dreamlike world emerges where things are never quite what they seem. The deer guides the viewer through the work, leaping and running, only to be revealed as trapped behind fences. Blending recent staged photographs with images from the past two decades, the project reflects personal transformation and societal change.

Seen from a macro perspective, the world blurs into abstraction, inviting interpretation beyond the frame. There are no portraits; human presence appears only as suggestion. People are reflected in animals, stones, objects, fruits, plants, water, and smoke. A childlike sense of uncertainty and fantasy becomes tangible. The values passed down from the past are critically examined, reconsidering what we accept as truth and how those truths shape our sense of self.

Tracing moments between safety and threat, childhood and adulthood, stillness and change, the work moves between the personal and the collective. Through reinterpretation, connections emerge and an old legend unfolds in a new light, loosening the entanglement of trauma, inherited norms, and conflicted identity, and making space for new understandings of gender, belonging, and liberation.

The work will be published as a book by Witty Books in June 2026. The subsequent phase involves the development of an exhibition concept that brings together text, audio, and photographic material in a cohesive spatial experience.