The Second Homecoming – Cave opening 7

This work belongs to The Second Homecoming series. The Second Homecoming series title refers in my mind to an outsider’s perception of a fresh place. In the Cave-openings, I aim to reconceptualise the notion of homecoming by giving glimpses of various landscapes which we are encouraged to look at as if from inside a cave. These landscapes are beautiful, perfect and nurturing to gaze at, yet inevitably distanced. Initially, I was thinking of refugees, the Indigenous peoples and other displaced, but obviously the work could refer far more broadly, physically or spiritually. The Door series rather represent an elusive notion of a gateway, where everything is possible and homecoming can be dreamt into reality. Doors as magical portals resonate with a sense of returning home, this time with a truer sense of belonging; integrating the fragments of a displaced soul, and thus bonding the shadow-self with the core-self under the light of an unexpected mystical and alchemical atmosphere.
Emerging symbols and metaphors also opens us up to a paradoxical approach of questioning the (power of!!) vulnerability of each individual. They urge us to realise the potentiality arising from the gap between the visible and invisible manifestations of individual and social structures. I suggest the continual expansion of a poetic persona as a methodology of surrendering to the infinite. This existential act encourages me to speculate upon the irony of a homecoming that has only a distant possibility for a true arrival, arrival to one’s own self - especially if disordered by the current systems we live in. The concept of an ‘outsider’ in the context of social and psychological displacement is becoming more and more problematic in our societies. One of my aims is to shift perception between displacement and the re-integration of human experience, poeticise it and, in this manner, promote individual and societal change.

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Elif Sezen is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist, writer/poet. She holds a PhD in Fine Art from Monash University. For over a decade, Elif has been investigating possibilities of reconceptualising and poeticising memory traces, existential states and a sense of place through poetry-based installations, photographic works, sculptural forms, paintings, drawings and mixed-media works. Her newest landscapes explore otherworldly atmospheres with abstract, surreal, ethereal, celestial and psychedelic impressions.
Elif’s broader multidisciplinary art practice engages with interwoven themes of trauma, grief, displacement, homecoming, reintegration and transcendence. She experiments in creating artistic expressions that are imaginative, yet also grounded in contemporary thought, exploring the universality of the human experience.
Her works are held in private collections, including JAHM (Justin Art House Museum). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo show at Five Walls (2025); and group shows at Fox Yard Studio - UK (2026), Five Walls (2026), The Museum of Australian Photography - MAPh (2025), The Museum of Art and Culture Yapang (MAC Yapang Art Prize 2025), Yarra Sculpture Gallery (2025), Project8 Gallery (2024), The National Portrait Gallery Canberra (Darling Portrait Prize 2024), CICA Museum Korea (2024) and the Metro Tunnel Creative Program (2023–2024).