This project is about the transformation of our souls in times of crisis, when life stops like a sleeping garden. To awaken, we have to make our way through difficulties, to re-analyze values, to realize why we are unhappy, to accept ourselves, to face our fears and to overcome them afterward.

For several years I was depressed, and was trying to analyze my life and find the way out of the realm of sadness and perplexity. One thing that helped me to explore the problem was to photograph other girls who had also experienced something like that.

I immersed the heroines in their sleeping gardens and captured them in representations that reflected their psychological states. What we all had in common was that we all felt like we were living in stories that were not written by or about us, while ours were lost somewhere in the high grass.

Awareness of this became a starting point for a long and difficult, but such a necessary and interesting journey. A journey towards my happiness and myself.

I want to show that a difficult period of stagnation, melancholy, and pain that can happen in our lives, is also beautiful and poetic. It is a natural part of being a human. Being vulnerable, we are unable to see this beauty at the moment, but I make it possible to look at it later.

Such a personal crisis also teaches us the value of life, which for sure will sparkle again. We just need to take the first step, even a small step, towards ourselves.

Alena Kakhanovich