I would like to acknowledge the work of Kaylene Beaujolais, whose talent and guts as a model has brought another level of power and emotion to both of these series. Thank You.
This project grew out of an interest in messing up photographs. I wanted the process of creation to continue after the picture was taken; I wanted to get away from the realm of the photographs and make something where the human hand could be seen; on a gut level, I wanted to push my pictures until they looked the way I felt. After experimenting with various ways of doing this on physical photographs, I began drawing and adding layers of texture to my images in Photoshop. I found myself returning again and again to two iconic images-the crown and the anatomical heart-and thinking about the words a friend had spoken: “I am the queen of my life”. This was a feeling I had longed for in myself. A queen sits in the seat of her own authority, investigates the various landscapes of her pain wearing her crown, chooses to let her heart break in order to release what is trapped inside, and tells her worst stories even after she's healed in order to light the way for others. That queen became the figurehead for this project.
By drawing on my photographs, I began to see what was behind the desire to mess them up: the feeling that the pictures I could take were not enough to tell the story I wanted to tell. I had just been through the extremely painful experience facing the whole truth about my upbringing, and was wondering what was the point of so much pain? What was supposed to come out of it? The story I wanted to tell was not my particular story, but the larger themes of struggle, to understand, in a fundamental way, what it means to love all aspects of myself and be loved. This project offered a way for me to investigate these questions, a way to honor and release the pain itself so that I could receive its gifts and make them visible, and a way to learn how to become the queen of my own life.
My starting point was a woman trapped in a pain that feels meaningless; my ending point was a queen. The journey between those points was a challenge: to know myself in all my parts. In order to depict the transformation from on to the other, I had to break it down into moments of despair, grief, release, surrender, hope and beauty. I learned that the first part of the journey is about letting layers of the old self fall away and the second half is about healing and reconstructing a new self with a deeper understanding. In reconstructing a new self, a great leap of faith is required - in order to transcend what happened and become more than that story, in order to believe in something bigger than all of this, and in order to begin to see oneself, rather than external events, as the miraculous and beautiful thing that is trying to emerge. I offer this project as a series of lamps to light the road.
Through my photography I awaken people to the universal love and support which flows from the earth no matter where we are and what we are going through. We have this special connection to the earth because we are made of the earth. The minerals in the rocks and soil are in our bones. The air that surrounds us, we breathe into our lungs. Water flows in our blood. Literally, we are of the earth. The earth is our mother, and as such gives us witness and support.
My photographs reveal intense and vibrant moments of our human connection with the earth, and thresholds of transformation we encounter as humans. I express the different ways the earth supports the liminal moments through a variety of landscapes, connecting the viewer to the intersection of human and earth. By photographing in urban and wild landscapes I build on my belief that wherever my body is, where my feet touch the ground, the power of the earth is always there.
The ultimate goal of my work is to show this relationship between human and earth in such a way that viewers open to a deeper more profound relationship with the natural world and see that the earth has the capability to give us exactly what we need during different phases of life. This can never be taken away or destroyed. We are of the earth, it is our birthright.