Isolating with young children brought renewed presence, beauty and purpose to my days, but there was also a darker underworld of more difficult experiences in me that needed a space to be recognized: the desire to escape, anxiety about safety, grief for the world, desperation, frustration, and overwhelm.
More than ever before, I was driven during the pandemic to use the camera to wrestle with and articulate my inner world. Each image is an attempt to condense a feeling state – a desire, a dream, a fear – into a kind of visual artifact. To mark it, express it, maybe even let it go. I mostly used a digital camera with a ten-second delay timer to make these narrative-driven self-portraits, influenced by my background in theater and performance.
The images are vessels that hold the tension between the light and the dark simultaneously. Curiously, when I made an image out of an “ugly” moment, the grace that also lives inside it often came suddenly to light. Or a sense of the absurd or the surreal provided me a moment to breathe, to break through the quotidian, the daily grind, however briefly.