Carried

Sometimes it sits underneath words, identity, or where we are from.

It’s a feeling of existing inside something larger than what we can name.

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Something quieter.

Something carried.

 

Belonging can move between people and across time, through stories told, photographs, and objects carried from one home to another.

There are parts of my cultural background I grew up alongside, but not fully inside. Parts that feel both close and distant. Still, the sense of belonging has always been there.

 

Incomplete belonging is still belonging.

You belong even where there are gaps, even where there is absence.

 

Sometimes belonging is inherited.

Sometimes it is something we recognise and choose to keep carrying.

It lives in what stays with us, in what returns to us, in what feels familiar before we understand why.

 

The colours in this collection come from prints that travelled with my family, particularly my Mum, across countries and homes before reaching me. I’ve carried them with me from home to home, too.

Colours I recognised before I ever thought about them. Colours that had already settled somewhere in me. Colours of the home and of my heart.

 

This collection sits in that space where objects hold stories and traces of lived experience. Where they remind us of parts of ourselves we may not be able to fully describe, but still recognise. They carry what is passed on, sometimes reshaped slightly each time, but something of it always remains.

 

Belonging lives in what we carry forward.