Layered

LAYERED is a personal exploration of memory, identity, and the experience of growing up between cultures. Drawing from my Moroccan and English heritage, the work combines archival family photographs, layered imagery, and spoken word to reflect on the emotional complexity of carrying multiple histories and influences at once.

Using family archives as both material and subject, I distort and reconstruct photographs through layering, fragmentation, and visual overlap. Figures partially disappear, merge, and dissolve into one another, challenging the idea of the photograph as a fixed or complete record. Instead, the images reflect the unstable nature of memory and the way identity is continuously shaped through inheritance, emotion, and lived experience.

At the centre of the project is the poem Layered, written and voiced by myself, which explores ancestry, migration, resilience, and belonging. Through both image and sound, the work considers what it means to exist between different cultural realities without feeling divided by them. Rather than viewing identity as something singular or easily defined, LAYERED embraces complexity, contradiction, and depth.

A group of children in costumes and sashes, sitting and standing on a stage during a performance or pageant, with an adult speaking into a microphone, in a room decorated with photos and fabric drapes.
An elderly woman in traditional clothing and a young boy stand outdoors in front of a painted backdrop of landscape scenery. The woman is seated on a decorated chair, and the boy is standing next to her with his hand on his hip.
A family group photo outdoors with three adult men, two adult women, and four young children, surrounded by trees, bushes, and flowers.
A double exposure photograph featuring two men and two women. The men are dressed in vintage clothing, walking outdoors near a car, with grass and trees in the background. The women are superimposed, with one smiling and the other looking down, both
Children gathered around a birthday cake on a decorated table, blowing out candles.
A double exposure photo of a group of people at the beach, showing their faces overlapped and blending with the ocean and sky in the background.
A vintage photo of a group of men standing outdoors, some shirtless, with buildings in the background, during daytime.
Group of children in scout uniforms and casual clothing standing outdoors on a road, with rocky terrain and trees in the background.
Person standing in front of a large landscape painting on an outdoor wall, wearing shorts and sandals, with legs shown.

Layered There’s a whole history inside me that never learned to whisper. It moves through my body like a pulse with its own agenda, rising at the strangest moments, a smell, a sound, a memory I never lived but still recognise. I’ve spent years trying to name it, pin it down, explain it to people who only see the outline. But some things aren’t made for explanation, they’re made for feeling. And I feel it in the way I enter a room, in the instinct to greet warmly, in the way certain words taste heavier when I say them out loud. In the way two different worlds can sit in my chest without asking permission.

It’s not chaos, it’s depth. It’s the kind of complexity you carry quietly, like a secret only your bones understand. There are moments that shake me when I realise I’m built from stories that travelled, survived, adapted, loved fiercely in languages I’ll never fully master. And there’s a pride in that, a power. A fire that doesn’t announce itself but lives steady just beneath the skin.

Sometimes I feel the weight of expectations, the confusion of belonging everywhere and nowhere, the echo of questions I’m tired of answering.

But even then, there’s something in me that refuses to break, a stubborn root, a memory of resilience, a reminder that I come from people who learned to make home out of places that weren’t always gentle.

I don’t stand here split, I stand here layered, I stand here full, I stand here carrying more than one lifetime of meaning.

And every step I take is backed by generations, seen and unseen, loud and quiet, soft and unshakeable.

So ​when I speak,​ ​​I’m not speaking​ alone, ​​I’m speaking​ with echoes, with history, with love that travelled oceans just to end up in my bloodstream.

This is who I am, not simple, not small, not singular.

I am built from depth, built from contrast, built from worlds that shouldn’t fit but do.

And I’m done shrinking that, I rise with all of it, every contradiction, every memory, every shadow and every light.

I am the sum of every story that chose to survive in me, and nothing about that is small. 

— Jaiyana Chelikha