Exhibition Statement
My practice investigates self-portraiture through photography and alternative photographic processes as a means to expose invisible weights of abuse, generational trauma, and anxiety that are internalized and carried within. In photographing myself, I have come to think of my body as an environment: a terrain marked by history, contact, and reaction.
Within LANDMARKS, I examine the evidence of trauma as geological and psychological landmarks across the landscape of the body. Guided in part by Rosalind E. Krauss’s insight that photography can function as an imprint or transfer of the real — “closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches” — I strive to make self-portraits that cannot be untangled from the way they are made.
This series is realized through my own engagement with cyanotype chemistry: I coat my skin with light-sensitive emulsion and press it into direct contact with prepared cloth, allowing reaction, exposure, and duration to determine the image. The resulting shrouds or body blueprints are cameraless, created through contact and chemical transformation rather than optics or mediation. The images resemble skin, bruising, and strata: surfaces shaped by both remembered and somatic experience.
The process carries an element of risk. Historically cyanotypes are fixed with water after exposure, halting their capacity to change; in LANDMARKS, I forgo that final fix, leaving the cyanotype reaction open to ongoing shifts in hue and tone. The slow development echoes the non-linear progression of healing and memory: what begins in one state transforms into another through time and exposure.
LANDMARKS was honored with the Innovation in Printmaking Award from the Janet Turner Print Museum (2021) and received recognition from the Denis Roussel Award for Outstanding Work (2021). These recognitions affirm the project’s investment in process, material inquiry, and the body as evidence.
In this work, photography ceases to be a window and becomes a terrain; one that holds the marks of experience, reaction, and presence.
