This work was created for the Silver Festival competition, whose theme was CITY. The starting point was the relationship between nature and what humans build upon it: agate — a stone formed over thousands of years in the hollow of a geode — contrasted with concrete, the artificial stone of contemporary cities. I see the city as a geometric growth of concrete layered over nature, another stratum added to the organic world.
Agates, with their multicoloured, alternating bands, became for me a metaphor for natural processes that continue despite external structures. Concrete became their opposite: fast, rigid, imposed.
The photo session was created during the pandemic, at home — in a building, in concrete, in isolation. That context gave the work an additional, personal dimension. The agate began to resonate with the experience of confinement, and the “Agates” became a play on my name and the layers that accumulated within me during lockdown.
The photographs show me in a space that both protected and restricted. In this light, the work became a story about being enclosed, about the growth of inner layers, and about processes that persist despite the concrete surrounding them.