My project, The Vessel, grew out of a deeply personal experience.

Eleven years ago, I went through cancer. Rationally, I understand that this chapter of my life is over. I have been in remission for many years. And yet, before every medical examination, something familiar returns — not first in my thoughts, but in my body. A tension I recognise immediately. A memory that exists before words.

Over the course of seven months, I worked on transforming this experience into a photobook — not as a documentary account of illness, but as a poetic visual exploration of fear, bodily memory, and the invisible emotional spaces that remain long after survival.

I was never interested in illustrating illness literally. I did not want to create a visual record of diagnosis or treatment. Instead, I searched for a visual language capable of expressing something more fragile and difficult to name: the way trauma settles into the body, how memory resurfaces uninvited, and how fear changes its shape over time.

Making this book became something more than simply creating a project.

It became an act of completion.

I found myself returning again and again to the same images, unable to fully let them go. Some photographs had become emotionally inseparable from the experience itself. Editing the book was not simply about selecting the strongest images; it became a process of understanding what needed to remain, what needed to be released, and what form this story wanted to take.

Over time, I realised that what mattered was not simply making the work, but finishing it.

In some way, this became a form of closure — not because the past disappears, but because giving an experience physical form changes your relationship to it. As long as something remains internal, it continues to return unfinished. But when it becomes something tangible — something you can hold in your hands, open, and close — something shifts.

Holding the finished book in my hands changed something.

For the first time, the story existed outside of me.

Not erased. Not forgotten.

But given form.

The book became not a trigger pulling me backwards, but a witness to a journey I had already lived through.

Today I presented it in a small gathering, and what moved me most was seeing that people understood the quiet poetic language of the work. They saw not only a story about illness, but a story about fear, memory, survival, and the remarkable way the body continues to remember.

Perhaps that is what completion really means.

Not closing the past, but making space for what comes next.