Healing Body

Voyeur or witness; This question is always on my mind. I like to think the answer is the latter and that my images will leave the viewer in awe about the resilience of the human body, just the way it marvels me. But sometimes I wonder. After all, the subject of the images are the remnants of a traumatic experience - scars.

After working with people for almost a year, I realized the ‘Scar Project’ needed another name, and so it became the ‘Healing Body’ project. A plain interest in scars on skin turned into a search for strength and joy as a side effect to difficult aspects of life.

The prints are mostly black and white images. These are archival digital prints on textured paper. I am also using a process from the first half of the nineteenth century called Vandyke brown. The black and white serves me well for the documentary facets of the project. The Vandyke on the other hand, results in prints with different values of brown and makes the images luminous, soft, and hopeful.

Different from the photographic prints are the almost life size prints on silk, some printed with the Vandyke procedure, others as Iris prints. These photographs on silk are perpetually in motion which suits the subject of the image, a woman who hides and also reveals her mastectomy while dancing with a veil. This represents not only the complicated reality of living with scars but also reveals that indeed beauty is not only skin deep.

First Words

My brother would say green and I would say red. My mother would say green and I would say blue. We all had difficulties understanding colors, due to a genetic defect, and we would all think the other was completely wrong. Ever since that time I wondered how it happened that meaning was assigned to certain things like letters from the alphabet and that most people would agree about their meaning. What was it like, the very first time two people would agree on the meaning of a certain composition of lines and shapes and know exactly what it would mean.

In trying to recreate a similar event the ‘First Words’ series was born. By creating different compositions with things that can be found every where, such as sticks, seeds and bones, I create compositions that become more stylized with each next version the way I imagine a character is born. Some of the images are created using traditional photography and some are created by using a scanner.

While there is plenty of research done into the development of the written language, we don’t have any eye witness accounts of the first time communication through the written word happened. By trying to recreate that moment I am thinking about the visual elements and how they communicate to us. In that way this is also a study about the formal language of art.