Impermanence
This work began as illustration, intending to photographically explore and express how all things pass away. It wasn’t long in exploring the nuances of impermanence that I felt an imperative to include the impermanence closest to home - that of my own body and mind.
It is said one cannot look into one’s own eyeball, and I suspected we are similarly blind when trying to imagine our own absence. With this in mind I began to include myself in my photographs, as if using a mirror. Perhaps one day the need for such mirrors will dissolve completely, and with it all notions of separateness from other people, objects and experiences.
What does impermanence entail - that all things come to an end? I began to suspect that there must be more to it. What was anything before it existed in the form I am now experiencing? Will this also vanish and become something else? Is this something that has collapsed, or has it returned to its original form? Perhaps impermanence begins with the names and distinctions we attach to discrete moments in the flow of space and time - somewhat like photography itself. Just as photographs are made of silver halides clumping together, ink absorbing into paper or ones and zeros organizing to form an image, so too are atoms organizing and reorganizing themselves to form different objects, spaces, thoughts and feelings.
I found it difficult to consider such questions without loosening my grip on ideas and beliefs, allowing a broader interpretation to emerge along with increasingly subtle images. As I used photography to delve deeper into my understanding of impermanence I found it becoming a kind of therapy. As I created these images my experience of life's ups and downs, as events to avoid or crave, began to transform; they are simply life’s heartbeats. Somehow, making these images and considering such subtleties opens a space a space for compassion for myself and others.