The Self That Crosses With You
Carrying multiple versions of yourself across borders is one of the quiet psychological truths of emigration. A person may cross a border physically in a single day, but the self travels more slowly. The old language, the first home, the former habits, the childhood reactions, the private fears, and the newer identity all arrive together. Nothing comes as one clean piece. This is why I often return to doubled faces, divided figures, layered bodies, and symbolic portraits in my artwork. They show a person not as one fixed identity, but as several selves carried inside one form.
The Old Self Does Not Stay Behind
When someone leaves a country, the old self does not remain neatly behind them. It travels in accent, memory, taste, humour, family gestures, and the way certain streets or seasons still feel familiar. Borders may separate countries, but they do not separate the inner life so easily. In my drawings and art prints, this often appears through repeated faces and mirrored bodies. The figure seems to move forward, but another version remains visible beside it. The image suggests that departure is not a clean break. It is a carrying.
The New Self Forms In Motion
The new self forms gradually, through documents, routines, new streets, new friendships, work, language, and the small adjustments of daily life. At first this version may feel uncertain or incomplete, but slowly it begins to gather shape. The person becomes different without becoming separate from what came before. This kind of becoming interests me because it is never smooth. In symbolic wall art, a divided figure can show the moment when the self is still forming: partly known, partly unfamiliar, still being redrawn by movement.
Language And The Versions Of The Self
Language often reveals how many versions of the self a person carries. In one language, you may feel quick, emotional, precise, ironic, or close to childhood. In another, you may feel more careful, quieter, more formal, or newly invented. Neither version is false. Each language opens certain doors and closes others. This is why faces in my posters and drawings are often not fully readable. They suggest an inner life that cannot be translated all at once. A person crossing borders becomes visible in layers, never completely in one voice.
Memory As A Borderless Country
Memory does not obey borders. It carries old rooms into new apartments, old weather into new seasons, old voices into present silence. A person may live in one place while emotionally returning to another. This is not always nostalgia. Sometimes it is simply the way identity preserves its own continuity. In my artwork, repeated motifs behave like memory: eyes, flowers, borders, dark backgrounds, and mirrored faces return again and again, changed by context but still recognisable. They show how the past continues to move inside the present.
The Beauty Of A Many-Selved Life
Carrying multiple versions of yourself can feel confusing, but it can also create depth. A person who has crossed borders may hold several ways of reading a room, understanding silence, loving, protecting themselves, or recognising danger and beauty. The self becomes more spacious, even when it feels less simple. In a symbolic portrait, this can appear as a face with another face beside it, a body with more than one direction, or a figure that seems both present and elsewhere. Multiplicity becomes not a flaw, but a form of emotional knowledge.
Why Borders Belong In Symbolic Art
Borders belong in symbolic art because they are never only geographical. They are emotional, linguistic, cultural, and bodily. For me, this theme naturally enters my artwork, posters, art prints, drawings, symbolic portraits, and wall art because my visual language already returns to doubling, repetition, memory, transformation, and divided forms. Carrying multiple versions of yourself across borders is not about becoming fragmented beyond repair. It is about learning to live as a layered figure, made from departures, arrivals, old rooms, new rooms, and every self that had to cross with you.
