Father time: a visual meditation on five years of parenthood

In his series Family Triptych, Polish photographer Igor Omulecki is looking back at five years of his life and work that were completely transformed by his becoming a father. The first part, called Lucy (after the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, known as the “mother of man”) starts with the pregnancy of Omulecki’s wife, Daria. Together the pair enter a garden of deeply symbolic images suggesting a sacred garden, Adam and Eve, the soft yet invincible power of nature and family as a sanctuary in the deep woods of life. The second part of the triptych, IT, features both the photographer’s son and father exposing the links between generations. The calmness of mountains, the ritual costume of an unknown tribe and drawings made by a child’s hand make up an endless circle of time. In the final part, Waveherd, emotions give way to the calmness of eternity. “During the journey, Omulecki’s garden imperceptibly flows into the cosmos”, writes curator Jakub Śwircz. “Clouds appear, the moon, finally a nebula of stars. A wide-angle view is shown, and with it, we see the oldest connection with the family, whose history the artist only began to learn at the garden’s edge”.