Over the years this has led the artist to travel back to her hometown to capture the feeling of home in an ongoing documentary series Motherland, which asks questions: “How can a home be defined through images? How can I make projects that deal with home, migration or memory?” Upon each return to Poland the photographer set out to capture her family and friends who still live there, alongside a range of quiet impressions of the landscapes that she grew up in — “the rhubarb, the tomatoes, all the things that are quiet echoes of memory” she says. “Through these images, I tried to capture not only memories, but also the emotions, atmospheres, and fragments of everyday life that continue to connect me to my roots.”
In a recent self-initiated project titled Growing Album, Ewlenia brought these images together to create a reimagining of the traditional family album by designing a publication that quite literally allows her to plant her Polish roots on whatever soil she finds herself on. Whilst selecting images of people, places and plants that hold deep personal meaning to translate into a photo book, Ewelina sourced something else to go alongside them: seeds that resonated with each memory.
In order to make the paper for the publications seed-sewn pages by hand, the artist used “old maps of my hometown, Lubań, and carefully archived newspaper clippings collected by my grandmother”, to form new sheets. Ewelina then embedded these regional seeds into the paper’s grain whilst it was still damp, and once half-dry, began the photo transfer process: “I chose this technique intentionally: it securely locks the seeds between the paper and the transfer layer, allowing them to remain intact, while still offering the possibility for the seeds to germinate from the back,” she tells us.
The resulting images are printed with a soft textured and painterly appearance — almost as ephemeral as memories themselves, stitched together with garden cord from her grandmother. A photographic vessel that looks alive and tender, the book will grow differently depending on what foreign ground it greets – a quiet reminder, in physical form, that “home doesn’t always have to be a fixed place but rather a space that we continuously recreate, depending on where we are at any given moment”, Elena ends.