The Survival of the Self

The Survival of the Self is a photographic meditation on resilience. Shaped by the artist’s personal recovery from a rare illness, this body of work delves into what it means to remain intact—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—in the face of rupture.

Through layered self-portraiture and aqueous landscapes, the artist explores the delicate threshold between concealment and revelation. The photographs unfold in a dreamlike visual language shaped by algae, light, water, where the colour shifts into fluid, green and pink surfaces.

The project is inspired in part by Polish singer songwriter Marek Grechuta’s 1971 song “Ocalić od zapomnienia” (“To Save from Oblivion”), a poetic plea to preserve the fleeting. In this context, photography becomes an act of resistance against forgetting—a way to hold on to fading memories, gestures of care, and the shifting sense of self shaped by illness, dislocation, and fragmented memory.

Embedded in the artist’s experience as part of the Polish diaspora in Australia, The Survival of the Self reflects a complex interior world shaped by cultural memory, silence, and the body’s capacity to endure. The act of veiling recurs throughout her work—not as concealment, but as a quiet strategy of transformation. It offers a protective skin, a porous boundary between past and present, absence and presence.

Neither purely autobiographical nor detached, this work inhabits the liminal space where personal history intersects with the collective. It invites the viewer to consider what must be remembered, and what can only survive in fragments.

work-in-progress