23/07/2026
‘Water Knows, Water Forgets’, 2025 London CHRYSALIS REBIRTH Carpel centres on water as a force of transformation: fluid, essential, and ever-changing. Water is life; it carries us before birth in amniotic fluid, and it holds memory, fixing images in the photographic process. But water is also tied to death-the river we cross, the tide that takes us, the vessel that carries us away. The child’s hand releasing the jellyfish speaks to this duality. A jellyfish is 95% water, nearly indistinguishable from the ocean it drifts in.
We, too, are mostly water, shaped by it, sustained by it, and eventually returned to it.
At the centre of the installation, a plexiglass box holds a photographic plate of a baby in the womb, suspended in liquid. The image, originally from an ultrasound—a clinical, digital record of life before birth—has been transformed using the wet collodion process, an
antique photographic technique that requires liquid at every stage. This shift from modern technology to a historical, hand-developed method echoes the work’s themes of time, memory, and rebirth. The liquid inside the box preserves and distorts, much like water itself—able to hold, dissolve, and reshape.
The soil on the ground reminds us of what remains when water recedes, what takes root, what erodes, what is left behind. This work is about rebirth not as a fresh start, but as an ongoing process, one that flows like water, carrying traces of the past as it moves forward.
Curated by Bengü Gün
