TITLE: Skin Protection

My mother had a fear of broken glass because, when she was a young adult, she had an accident and cut open her arm. She carried the memory of that wound with her—a physical scar, but also an invisible one, a lingering unease around anything shattered. I never thought much of it until I found myself drawn to broken glass in my own work, using it to obscure, distort, and fragment the past.

Skin Protection explores the fragility of identity and the fear of erasure. The woman in this portrait, once preserved in a moment of time, now exists in a state of destruction. The shattered glass over her face reflects how fear fractures perception, how trauma distorts reality. Is she disappearing, or has she already been forgotten? Is her identity forcibly erased, or is she protecting herself by becoming unrecognizable?

The use of an antique photograph adds another layer of unease—this was once a person with a name, a story, a life. Now, all that remains is an image, and even that is breaking apart. The contrast between the delicate past and the violent present mirrors the way fear lingers across generations, reshaping itself but never truly disappearing.

Through this piece, I explore how fear warps memory and perception, how it embeds itself in objects, in history, in the way we see ourselves and others. Like broken glass, fear is both dangerous and revealing—it cuts, but it also exposes.

AUTHOR: Gemma Carly Pepper (Switzerland)


Gemma Pepper is a Zurich-based British artist and photographer whose work explores themes of identity, intergenerational trauma and the human relationship with nature and the environment. Her artistic approach is based on the rediscovery of forgotten, lost or discarded objects, especially found photographs, which she reinterprets with a particular eye for their meaning and history.
With a preference for analogue techniques such as cyanotype and mixed media, Gemma Pepper creates unique, timeless and haunting works. Her work challenges the viewer to question the relationship between past and present, personal memory and collective history.


She began her academic training by studying fine art photography at Llandrillo College in Rhos-on-Sea (North Wales) and continued at the University of Derby (England). In 2021, she successfully completed her Master of Arts ZFH in Art Education with a focus on Curatorial Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

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She has been represented by Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Paris/Geneva) since 2022 and has received awards such as the Elles x Paris Photo Award and nominations such as the Fujifilm Photoville Award from the Olten Photo Festival. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Photo Basel, Paris Photo, Photo London and AIPAD New York, and can be found in public and private collections.