A Woman Who Paused to Feel is a visual autobiography created on the threshold of three years living in Melbourne, before the artist’s new chapter in Brussels. It is a story of drifting away from an eight-year marriage toward becoming someone new — from the ache of solitude to the tenderness of resilience, from arriving together to departing alone.

Across three years of photographs, Shiva Ghanbarian reveals her intimate story through stillness, silence, and solitude. Five poetic chapters ,Where the Sky Hangs Heavy, My Kitchen Before and After the Knife, Duet of Solitude, Solitude, and Root and Rise, translate her emotions into a contemplative narrative of becoming.

Belonging to the tradition of slow, intimate storytelling, this photobook does not seek spectacle, but presence. Each photograph is a pause: an act of noticing, of listening, of holding space for the fragile textures of everyday life.

Turning its pages, the viewer encounters not only images, but the lived experience of a woman on the threshold of change, listening to the ache of solitude, holding space for the longing to be held, and tracing the quiet radiance of becoming through overlooked details of daily life.

A Woman Who Paused to Feel invites the reader into a world where resilience is quiet, solitude is luminous, and the smallest details become pathways to truth.