Every material carries a memory.
Before becoming part of an artwork, the paper in my studio has already lived another life. It has been a newspaper announcing yesterday’s events, a handwritten letter preserving an intimate voice, the page of a forgotten notebook, an advertising leaflet briefly held in someone’s hands, a map, a receipt, an envelope that crossed cities and countries. These fragile fragments of everyday existence arrive in my studio not as waste, but as silent witnesses of human experience.
In my practice, recycling is not simply an ecological choice. It is an act of listening.
I collect what society has finished using and invite it into a new narrative. Layers of recycled paper become paintings, collages, artist’s books, papier-mâché sculptures, and entire paper forests. There is a quiet irony in this transformation: paper itself was once a forest. By allowing it to return to the form of trees, branches, and organic landscapes, I complete a symbolic cycle, giving the material the possibility of remembering its own origin.
The forest does not disappear; it changes language.
This circular journey reflects the rhythms of nature itself, where nothing truly becomes waste. Leaves fall, decompose, nourish the soil, and give birth to new life. In the same way, discarded paper becomes fertile ground for new images and new stories.
The same philosophy guides my work with textiles.
Old linen sheets, worn curtains, forgotten garments, pieces of clothing once belonging to me or to my daughter, sweaters patiently unraveled to recover their wool—these humble materials form my personal textile archive. Every fabric has absorbed gestures, seasons, emotions, celebrations, absences, and the quiet intimacy of domestic life. Their fibres retain invisible traces of the bodies they once embraced.
Rather than hiding this history, I allow it to remain present.
Through quilting, patchwork, embroidery, tapestry, and hand-stitched constructions, these fabrics are woven into new compositions where memory is not erased but layered. Each stitch becomes a gesture of repair. Each seam acknowledges that beauty often emerges from what has been broken, worn, or forgotten.
Textiles have always been among humanity’s oldest storytellers. Long before photography, they preserved family histories, migrations, rituals, and identities. By working with recycled cloth, I continue this ancient dialogue between material and memory, transforming personal archives into collective narratives.
My artistic process therefore exists between archaeology and ecology.
I excavate everyday materials while imagining sustainable futures. Recycling becomes more than environmental responsibility; it becomes an ethics of care. Caring for objects, for resources, for memories, and ultimately for the fragile ecosystems that sustain our lives.
In an age of accelerated consumption, where materials are designed to become obsolete almost instantly, choosing to work with what already exists is also a quiet form of resistance. It challenges the culture of endless production and celebrates transformation over replacement.
Nothing is truly insignificant.
A torn notebook page, a faded piece of linen, a discarded advertisement, a child’s outgrown dress, a sweater reduced to a ball of yarn—each contains invisible narratives waiting to be revealed. Art offers them another possibility: not to return to what they once were, but to become something entirely new while carrying their previous lives within them.
Perhaps this is what memory itself does.
It does not preserve the past unchanged. It transforms it, layer after layer, into the person we become.
My artworks emerge from this continuous process of metamorphosis. They invite us to reconsider the value of the overlooked, to recognize beauty in imperfection, and to understand that sustainability is not only an environmental practice but also a poetic way of inhabiting the world.
Every recycled fragment reminds us that creation begins not with something new, but with the willingness to see new possibilities within what already exists.
