This artist statement offers a window into my creative practice: a hybrid of symbolic writing, ritual design, and narrative identity work.
Ink as Mirror
I’ve been writing since I was five. Before that, I read in silence. But when I finally learned to write, something clicked — not just in my mind, but in my hand.
Writing became a mirror. A place I couldn’t lie to myself. A way to decipher mood, memory, and meaning. While others learned to type, I learned to hold a fountain pen. Ink became a way of thinking. And I never stopped.
What began as personal expression became a long-form inquiry into the architecture of self through story.
Today, I create handwritten story artifacts — scrolls, fragments, letters, pages folded like secrets. These aren’t polished calligraphy pieces. They’re emotional records: shaped by mood, marked by cross-outs, made real through tremors. I use cotton and acid-free paper, fountain pens, and inks that sometimes bleed. That, too, is part of the lore.
Rituals Across Mediums
Much of my work lives between mediums. On paper, I craft narrative relics that feel like recovered myth. Digitally, I build interactive rituals using tools like Twine — returning storytelling to its oral, participatory roots. These aren’t just digital pieces; they’re part of a lived experiment in symbolic cognition, shaped by my own absorption in narrative. Each version shifts. Each reader shapes the tale.
I pair my writing with original photography — images as portals, mood-setters, and quiet witnesses. I learned to develop film in a darkroom with my father. That early training in texture, shadow, and patience still informs every frame.
Symbolic Systems and Theoretical Roots
At its core, this artist statement reflects how my work maps the entanglement between emotion, memory, language, and symbolic transformation.
In my practice, I challenge the aesthetic of perfection and the performance of spectacle.
What emerges instead is emotional depth, symbolic messiness, and quiet mystery — a space for the fragmented, the unfinished, the sacred-in-progress.
My work functions as both ritual and research — part of an ongoing effort to map how emotion, identity, and narrative structure entangle.
Themes in my work include:
- Emotional memory and narrative identity
- The architecture of language
- The sacred in the ordinary
- Re-enchantment, witnessing, and quiet rebellion
Some artifacts are sold, and some are gifted. Others are left behind in the world as lore drops — hidden scrolls for strangers to find. A few are just for me.
One Story Away
I make what I needed to find:
Pages that feel like mirrors.
Messages that feel like magic.
Stories that remind us:
We are never just one thing.
And we are only ever one story away from being seen.
—
Daria Condor
Thun, 2025