Wonder women: the bond between sisters
Kaur's use of landscape and nature embed a sense of magical spirituality in the images. Talismanic creatures – horse, rabbit, owl – punctuate the portraits, hinting at fairytales and the uncanny.
Siri Kaur: 'I was 14 when Simran was born in 1990. We have different mothers, so we grew up separately and I made pictures with her whenever I saw her. The work of Sally Mann and Nan Goldin gave me permission to see my family as a valid art subject. This image shows the aftermath of Christmas morning. Simran is unselfconsciously lounging on the floor, melding into her beloved dog'
'My work is about the many ways we create family. Even though Simran and I have such a huge age gap and are technically only half-sisters, she has always innately understood my need to make art, and always had a similar drive to investigate how we look at and understand others. Here I remember picking her up from school when I was home from university. We stopped to make this portrait in the golden afternoon light, her luminous eyes looking back at me with wisdom beyond her years'
'I remember focusing my camera on the snowflakes accumulating on a window, when suddenly Simran's face popped into the picture. She tried to grab my attention the way children do, and I remember being annoyed at her intrusion. Funny since the image is so much better with her nose smooshed into the frame'
'Simran was 11 when I made this photo of her with my new medium format camera on an island in Maine at dusk. It's impactful because of her direct challenging gaze that reveals her newfound awareness of her own body'
'When Simran was 12, I was living in Italy and she visited me. She was a little cranky and jetlagged so I asked her to pose on my couch in her perfectly mismatched pyjamas. I wanted a traditional portrait but she closed her eyes from exhaustion, and I ended up preferring this picture of her in a more contemplative state'
'Here Simran is 14 on a family trip to India. After my mother and father left a New Age Sikh cult and divorced, our father continued to wear a turban and practise a more traditional form of Sikhism. We always had ties to the predominantly Sikh Punjab region of India, and took a trip there as a family in 2004. Here Simran seems a little more self-conscious, she is becoming a bit more aware of how she arranges her limbs to pose'
'Here Simran is on vacation in Florida posing for me in her Wonder Woman underwear. She is teetering between childhood and adulthood, becoming aware of her own beauty and secure in knowing she has the right to take up space in the world '
'Simran was home from university, doing some yoga outside, and I came over to take some pictures in hopes of catching her in a relaxed state. In her 20s, perhaps because of ubiquitous phone cameras and social media, she started posing in a more self-conscious way and I actively tried to disrupt her automatic response to the camera'
'In the summer of 2022, smoke from terrible wildfires in Canada blanketed New England. We ventured out to pick some of that year's sad berry crop. Here Simran is pregnant but doesn't know it yet, sampling sour blackberries, standing in the strange smoky air'
'I found this nest in my sister's porch plant. The baby bird in its nest echoes an earlier black-and-white image of my brother and sister embracing, and serves as a reminder that we all inhabit the same planet. The colours of the blue egg, the hungry yellow beak, the pink flowers set on the field of green, seem too bright to be real, and yet there they were!'
'The passage of time is relentless, never ending, back and forth. The time that passes between us being born and having our own kids isn't actually that long in the scheme of the universe, just a blink'
'This is one of the final images I made for the book. Here Simran stands holding her daughter Luisa in a magical spot in the woods where we have made many pictures over the decades. Simran stares back at me with her unflinching gaze but she is older now and has experienced more than in the earlier portraits. Her daughter looks off camera into places we don't see yet; she will soon experience the cycles of life on her own journey'
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