SAKURA TRAILS is a series that subverts the traditional gaze of cherry blossom photography. While crowds flock to capture themselves by flowering trees in full, curated glory, the artist is pulled in the opposite direction. Every Spring for four years, she waited to capture what was left behind, what lied beneath. Her lens was magnetically drawn downward following the delicate trails and unfolding storyline left by fallen petals.
Delicate remnants of those photogenic spectacles are shown decontextualised from their glorious past in every way. Detached from their natural environment, soft fallen petals are seen clinging to the city’s grime, swept into gutters, wedged in hard cracks, drowned in puddles, or trampled in alleyways.
The artist sees each fallen petal as a precious vessel holding fragments of secret stories, fleeting memories and unspoken sorrow. Each pile is a dispersed poem. Each accidental composition an elegy. Each windswept trail, like confetti found the morning after the party scattered across the dirty dance floor, echoes the melancholy of better days. In the silence of the city’s overlooked corners, each petal seems to murmur: “Forget me not.” She listens intently knowing it will all be gone tomorrow.
This body of work leans into contrasts, between soft and hard textures, traces of nature in harsh urban settings, memory and erasure. The photographs in SAKURA TRAILS are intimate yet quietly defiant, a visual meditation on impermanence, remembrance, and the importance of what to often goes unnoticed.
