Ama Totoi: A Self Odyssey is an evolving self-portrait project that traces the shifts, relationships, emotions, places, and milestones that have shaped my life. Rather than treating self-portraiture as a single image of the self, the series approaches identity as something accumulated over time – built from memories, encounters, inherited photographs, and the people who have participated in my becoming.
The project began with old photographs drawn from my personal archive. Through processes of printing, layering, and photographic transfer onto wooden logs, these images move away from the conventional flat photographic surface and enter a sculptural form. The cylindrical body of the log does not allow the photograph to be seen all at once; parts of an image appear, disappear, and return as the viewer moves around it. This fragmented encounter mirrors the way memory itself operates – never fully available, always changing according to where we stand in relation to it.
The wooden forms become more than supports for photographs. They begin to behave like bodies, markers, and vessels through which different moments of my life can occupy the same physical space. Childhood, family, place, and the present self are brought into conversation without being forced into a single, fixed narrative.
Ama Totoi continues my larger inquiry into how a photographic image can inhabit an object and transform it into a vessel of memory. The work understands the self not as complete or static, but as continually formed and re-formed through experience. In this sense, the project is both archive and unfolding portrait – an attempt to look backward while remaining open to who I am still becoming.