Hiraeth is pronounced "HEER-eyeth" or "HEER-eye-th" in English, with a soft, breathy "th" sound at the end (like in "think")

Hiraeth is a handcut paper collage that weaves memory, longing, and transformation into a dreamlike landscape. Blending unrelated terrains—mountains, rivers, skies—it reflects the tension between freedom and feeling trapped, between what we know and what we feel. A woman, grown yet still childlike in wonder, stands at the threshold of past and present, surrendering to the in-between, longing for a home she can't go back home yet proud of where her curiosity took her in her journey in life. Like a diary written in textures, Hiraeth speaks in the visual language of memory, where nature, time, and self dissolve into something both lost and ever-present.

I started making this collage during a girl’s art hangout with one of my best friends the other day. I started rambling on about my childhood while creating and didn’t realize how much was coming out, and it made me understand that there was a lot that I needed to unpack and really examine with a magnifying lens.

I say I don’t like to time travel and stay stuck in the past or ruminate on the future, but I felt like that’s all I’ve been doing lately. I didn’t appreciate the things I had when I had them. And it made me wonder damn, did I ever really change? And then I’m like well you have, but you didn’t give yourself the grace of the process of change and allow yourself to grieve for what you lost. So this collage is putting that grief from paper with some help from the trees.

*cue Avril Lavigne’s 2008 album The Best Damn Thing that I had on repeat the whole year I was 13*