These artworks emerged from my PhD in Visual Arts, a practice based research project investigating displacement, identity, and belonging through autoethnography and artistic practice. While the research began as a critical reflection on the politics and ethics of representing forced migration, it gradually evolved into a body of sculptural and installation works that became an integral part of the project.

My starting point was a discomfort with the way images of displacement circulate through the media, often reducing complex human experiences to fleeting moments of spectacle. Rather than reproducing these images, I sought to transform them into material objects. Gestures, figures, and fragments drawn from media archives are reimagined through concrete, steel, sand, sound, and found materials, encouraging a slower and more contemplative way of looking.

Alongside these public images, the works incorporate elements from my own family archive, personal memories, and stories generously shared by people I met during fieldwork with refugees in Greece. Through translation, recontextualisation, and material transformation, these individual histories become symbolic forms that speak of migration, memory, loss, resilience, home, and belonging.

Material lies at the heart of this practice. Concrete, metal, and soil evoke both construction and destruction, permanence and fragility. They reflect a desire to resist the ephemerality of digital images by giving experiences of displacement physical presence and weight.

Although rooted in specific histories, the works move between fact and fiction, personal memory and collective experience. Imagined objects, reconstructed scenes, archival fragments, and sculptural interventions create spaces where viewers are invited to reflect on their own relationship with home, identity, borders, and belonging.

Rather than illustrating the research, these artworks became a way of thinking through it. They form the artistic outcome of my doctoral project and explore how material practice can communicate experiences that are often difficult to express through words alone.