AURA
AURA emerged from an interest in the changing nature of human relationships during the era of social media. The project began with a simple question: what remains of a person when friendship is increasingly mediated through screens, images and fragments of information?
Drawing upon photographs of people connected to the artist through online networks, the works transform recognisable faces into fragile and ghost-like presences. Rather than functioning as conventional portraits, they operate as traces. The image becomes a site where memory, projection and emotional attachment overlap.
The project is less concerned with documenting individuals than with examining the varying weight relationships exert upon consciousness. Some friendships pass lightly through our lives, leaving only faint impressions. Others persist for years, returning unexpectedly as memories, desires, anxieties or unresolved narratives. In this sense the portraits are not portraits of people alone but portraits of psychological proximity.
The title AURA deliberately invokes the tension between presence and absence. At a moment when digital technologies appeared to flatten human experience into endlessly exchangeable images, the project asks whether individuals continue to radiate a unique emotional charge. What survives beyond the profile picture, the status update or the passing encounter?