Honorable Mention / 2021 / Nature / Flowers

Isolation memories

"Isolation memories" was created during the lockdown from COVID. I was at home, spending most of my time waiting for my garden to come to life. Something that I don't usually get to see since I have a full time job. Every day I would check what has changed. It was a kind of ritual to get me through the days, weeks and months.
This reminded me the simple pleasures of life. How to celebrate the present and as life goes on and nothing stays forever the same, I thought that this, shall too come to an end. So I photographed this moment of my life through the flowers in the garden.

I am an artist and photographer from Bulgaria. To me photography is an exploration of the mind. A kind of fiction, offering a glimpse of a co-existing reality. A way of seeing a world floating between unspoken dreams yet-to-be and the endless nostalgia for the time that has never been, with a surreal motif.
Since photography is born in a split-second, I find it being the perfect medium to show a fraction of a supposed reality. A fraction that does not describe, but merely suggests. A fraction that has no beginning or an end, but is bound to have an afterlife, long and rich as the viewer’s memory.
The two main subjects I explore are women and flowers, as flowers are often associates with women and feminine.
My woman is a silent inhabitant of an alternative place that provides an escape from the passage of time. She is both strong and fragile. The center and only a fragment of something greater; a suggestion for something more.
Flowers are usually associated with women because of the idea of new life; a rebirth after the winter. Yet since they fade quickly, flowers are also linked with death. In my photographs a slice of this birth-to-death shift is suspended in time.