The Summons is a series of five photographic collages that grew from the discovery of a telegram recalling my grandfather to the frontline. I never met him, yet this small, official fragment of paper became a point of rupture—pulling the past sharply into the present and setting the narrative of the work in motion.

Constructed from layers of my own photographs, the series unfolds as a visual timeline shaped by memory, trauma, and the persistence of beauty across generations. It begins in a garden that exists between waking and memory, where time does not move forward but gathers. The flowers here are not symbols. They are sentinels. Their colour has not faded. They bloomed then, as they do now. I imagine my great-great-grandmother among them, and later my grandfather before war, touching the same petals, seeing the same hues. Through them, I feel a connection that is physical and real.

When the summons arrives, the garden reacts first. Colour surges, space compresses, and beauty becomes overwhelming. This is not departure, but rupture—the moment when everything becomes too vivid to bear.

After battle, coherence dissolves. Sound drains away, forms blur, and the garden recedes, as if remembered underwater. The swallows vanish from the sky. Nothing settles. Time loses its edges.

After the war, my grandfather became a market gardener. He returned to soil, growth, and repetition—to tending life quietly, day after day. In the final image, memory remains but is sealed. Time has softened its edges. The garden folds inward, intact and enduring, its colours unchanged. What remains is not peace, but distance—a way of holding what cannot be forgotten, while continuing to grow