Untitled

I was wandering through one of Rome's quieter, more residential neighborhoods — the kind of streets that wind without announcing where they're going — when I came across a stretch of long marble walls covered in dried plants. They had rooted themselves into the cracks at some point during a warmer season and stayed, long after the green had gone, their amber traces trailing down the pale stone like a quiet record of everything they had survived. It was midday, raining on and off, and I stood there with my Hasselblad for a while before I knew what I was actually looking at.

The marble holds them still. Not as a grave, but as a kind of witness — the stone keeping the record of something that insisted on taking root in the narrowest possible space, and did, and remained. The archival giclée print is held in a vintage wood frame whose corners are carved with floral detail, the botanical language of the frame and the image finding each other across different centuries. Proof that even in the cracks, something can prevail.

This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.