Apricot JAM

Baracklekvár

2021 - 

The Apricot Jam series examines home as an emotional and mnemonic experience, tracing how the sense of safety tied to childhood slowly unravels while the biological environment around us is also reshaped, warming and drying out. The Carpathian Basin is now one of Europe’s climate hotspots, where recurring heat waves and droughts make landscape change particularly visible on the Great Hungarian Plain. The starting point is that layer of family memory in which tastes, smells, repeated gestures and everyday objects appear not simply as recollections but as the first, personal order of the world. For me, one of the densest condensations of this is apricot jam: as a child it was always present at home, every year my great‑grandparents and grandparents cooked it, the jars lining the pantry shelves felt as self‑evident as the light in the kitchen or the dining table itself. In this sense, apricot jam is not just a motif but a shared point to which an inner feeling of home is attached.

The series does not rest on the comforting side of nostalgia; instead, it makes visible how the world preserved in memory no longer matches present reality. What once seemed stable and natural in childhood now appears fragile. The cool air of the pantry, the recurring fruit on the trees, the constant presence of jam and the felt security of family gatherings have shifted into the domain of the past. The work departs from this distance and asks how such an image of home can persist when the world it belonged to has already changed.

The visual form of the series follows this experience. The images are made using the cyanotype process, here tuned towards a sepia‑like palette rather than pure blue, so the tonal world itself evokes fading, recollection and distance. Cyanotype was developed in the mid‑19th century by Sir John Herschel as a simple, cheap contact‑copying method, later adopted in botanical illustration by figures such as Anna Atkins in her algae and fern photograms. The process relies on the photosensitivity of iron(III) salts: under UV light, an image forms, while the unexposed salts are washed away with water during development, fixing the print. Water is therefore essential not only technically, but metaphorically too: it is the medium of revelation and preservation, without which the image cannot be stabilised. 

One crucial layer of the project is the lived experience of environmental change. The landscape to which these childhood memories were attached has transformed significantly. On the lowlands of the Carpathian Basin, persistent rainfall deficits have accumulated in recent years, groundwater and surface water levels remain reduced in many areas, and climate projections indicate further intensification of drought hazards across most of the Great Hungarian Plain. Some apricot trees have not yet completely dried out, but there are fewer and fewer small farmers to prune, harvest and care for them. Village gardens and smallholdings are slowly disappearing, and homemade apricot jam jars are becoming rarer at local markets; the “homemade” label is no longer the default, but an exception. The loss of home thus appears not only emotionally but also socially and ecologically: it is not just the landscape that changes, but the knowledge and practices that once sustained it. 

The photographs function as both individual and shared memory traces. Their restrained compositions and sepia‑leaning tones are intended to offer viewers not a completed narrative but a visual field open to recollection. Childhood ways of seeing and adult experience sit side by side: one still believes in the stability of things, the other already perceives their dissolution. Apricot Jam works within this transition, seeking the moment when the memory of home remains recognisable even though the world it refers to is no longer the same.

Alongside the original series made with archaic methods, a body of images appears that focuses more directly on dryness, on the changing plains and the absence of water. These photographs are produced through an analogue–digital hybrid approach: experiences recorded on light‑sensitive material are extended and re‑articulated through digital post‑production, layering the visual language of the past with the technical tools of the present. The pairing of nostalgic, sepia‑toned cyanotypes with hybrid images of drought creates a strong contrast between a remembered world one wishes to preserve and the contemporary reality marked by water scarcity.

Within the images of desiccation, a recurring motif is the mushroom emerging from cracked soil. A small, ground‑level form that is familiar from a child’s perspective: at that height, one is literally closer to the earth, to its smell, to the sense that everything can be discovered. Here the mushroom carries both the naivety of childhood and the recognition of a harsher present. The soil hardly holds water, the surface has fissured, yet something still manages to grow, occupying the threshold between decay and renewal. Survival in these pictures is not a heroic gesture, but a quiet presence: a modest sign that life continues in some form even when personal feelings of safety have been shaken. In the context of the series, the mushroom becomes a carrier of childhood curiosity and of a kind of human attentiveness that endures. It suggests that ecological change can be read not only as irreversible loss, but also as a call to rethink the conditions under which life goes on. 

The series also includes an installation in which the cyanotypes are not subjected to the usual water wash. The unwashed layer continues to react to UV light throughout the exhibition, leading the images to gradually overexpose, fade and in some cases almost disappear. In conventional practice, water fixes and preserves the surface; here it is precisely the absence of water that becomes visible, signalling that the medium of development and conservation is no longer freely available. This installation is at once a technical gesture and a statement: in a place where the presence of water once seemed natural, the experience of its withdrawal and scarcity is now increasingly dominant. The work is still ongoing, and the project itself remains open, growing organically as new images, conditions, and material situations continue to shape it.