Saskia Druyan

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

Nothing Human

This body of work considers intimacy, connection and disconnection in human relationships. A personal archive of family photographs is the main source from which the project is derived, including an idiosyncratic album made by my grandfather during WWII, which stands alone from the more ordinary archive. Together they articulate fragments of a shared generational story, wherein an intimate history of violence and pathology can be traced over three generations. 

My interest is in intimacy and its effects: the profound mammalian need for connection, the way our first experience of bonding shapes our felt sense of the self, the world, and our invitation to exist within it, and the causes and impacts of rupture on these bonds.

 Relational bonds are the most formative experiences we have. They shape developing neural architecture and the body’s stress-response mechanisms, and emboss through epigenetics both the broader context of our time and place and the personal histories into which we arrive. An inseparable interplay exists between the world, our earliest loves, and our sense of self, mediated always through relationships. In this way, first the world makes us, and then we go on to make the world.

That constant fluid exchange of imprints, both outward and intimate, is where my interest lies and what I reflect on here. Though I look at it through the lens of my own experience, I consider the questions to apply equally to the broad, complex contexts of which we are all part