How To Climb A Tree by Aparna Nori (Regular Edition)

Aparna’s deeply lyrical photobook explores photography as a means to temporally anchor the affective nature of memory through experiential arcs, and shared spaces. This personal, intuitive image series episodically documents a timespan when her 10-year-old son was living in a boarding school in Madanapalle, India. What emerges is a collaborative project between mother and son drawn over five years of communication, wherein the images become meditative, introspective traces of places and moments that felt like home for both of them. Through the visual explorations, the artist takes liberties to re-enact and find alternative imaginings to moments that could not be documented. Interspersed with handwritten letters and illustrations, the book examines how a physical absence or distance can be expressively redrafted through emotional awareness. In this photo book, Aparna creates a safe space – one in which she allows her own vulnerability of the experience of motherhood to slip through while also trying to root her son, giving him a way to return to this time and space again and again.

About Aparna Nori

Aparna Nori is a lens based artist living between Singapore and Bangalore. Her work is rooted in the personal memory, identity and experiences, her explorations taking form and shape through photographic interventions and narratives. With a Master degree is filmmaking, she practices diverse forms of expression with digital and analog image making, alternative photographic processes, moving images and bookmaking.