Lunar Landscapes:
The Topography of Loss and Manipulations
The Lunar Landscapes series represents an ongoing exploration of the moon’s surface, capturing its profound connection to my own emotional and psychological landscape. Over the years, the moon has become a constant source of reflection for me, not just as a celestial body but as a symbol for the way our inner landscapes are shaped by time, memory, and experience. The work focuses on self-topography on paper, where I manipulate the paper to create tactile, layered representations of the moon and its scars—marking the passage of time and the changes that accompany it.
Through manipulating the paper, I seek to engage with the moon’s topography, not simply as a physical surface but as a metaphor for the marks left on the body and psyche by life’s experiences. The moon, with its craters, scars, and imperfections, reflects the fragility and impermanence of both the external world and the emotional states we carry. In this series, the paper becomes both the canvas and the map, with each manipulation representing the fragility of memory, emotion, and identity.
The process of manipulating the paper is both obsessive and meditative—each mark, each fold, and each distortion represents a moment of engagement with my internal world. Like the moon’s surface, which holds the evidence of countless impacts over eons, the paper bears the marks of time, reflecting both the destruction and the creation that occur within us. Each piece in the series is a manifestation of this ongoing interaction—shaping the material to reflect how the past continues to leave its mark, how it shapes the present, and how those marks can be reinterpreted or transformed over time.
In these works, I focus on the moon as a singular unit—a round, whole form that embodies the tension between unity and fragmentation. The topography of the moon, with its visible scars, becomes a metaphor for the personal terrain we all navigate—one that is marked by memories, traumas, and emotional shifts. Just as the moon’s surface is constantly affected by external forces, so too is the emotional self shaped by external events and internal responses. The manipulation of the paper is an act of mapping these interactions, a process of charting the scars, the wounds, and the resilience that shape who we are.
This series challenges the boundaries of materiality and representation, exploring the moon’s topography not as an object of distant fascination but as something deeply personal. The act of manipulating the paper, time and again, is a way of reflecting on the impermanence of all things—how structures break down, memories fade, and yet something remains, something that continues to shape and influence our world and our inner lives. Through Lunar Landscapes, I reflect on the ways in which the moon’s surface, much like the skin, bears the imprints of time, and how those imprints are as much a part of us as the experience of living itself.
