About Roots

This diptych portrays people I met in the Netherlands, each of whom arrived there from somewhere else.

What connects them is not a shared nationality, language, or history, but the experience of beginning again. Although their journeys are different, their stories often echo one another. In conversations, familiar themes return: leaving, adapting, remembering, belonging, and searching for a place to call home.

Living in a new country can create a peculiar sense of being suspended between places. Home is no longer entirely where you came from, yet the new place does not immediately become your own. Many people find themselves carrying multiple versions of home at once - memories of one place, daily life in another, and an imagined future somewhere in between.

The Netherlands became the place where these paths crossed. People who might never have met otherwise suddenly share the same streets, languages, uncertainties, and hopes. Their individual stories remain distinct, yet together they form a portrait of a community shaped not by origin, but by movement.

This work reflects on that fragile space between departure and belonging, and on the memories, identities, and experiences we carry with us wherever we go.