How The Light Gets In
This work was created in response to my close friend's terminal cancer diagnosis, which landed like a grenade amid the constant dark and disturbing news of the world. Watching a loved one’s suffering first and while also seeing the image stream of war, genocide, natural disasters and political chaos had me oversaturated and unable to function. Looking for a way to express my own grief and society's collective despair, I used my art as a therapeutic practice; turning to mother nature to search for light in a dark time.
The ancients once believed that the stars were holes in the sky where ancestors looked down on us from above, eyes shining. That simple thought somehow brought comfort, knowing my friend would soon be among the stars. Before she died, she told me the thousand pinpricks of pain we experience in life are also the places in us where we grow wiser, more courageous, more loving.
The words of a Leonard Cohen song echoed this idea-
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
In this series I created work that layers my original photography with collected paper ephemera into unfixed collages to represent the fragility and fleeting nature of life. I then painted on an abstract dot pattern, rephotographed the pieces and poked hundreds of tiny holes in the resulting prints, adding places for light to get in and love to shine out. It's a multi-faceted process that synthesizes my many creative practices to alchemize the dark materials of grief into light.
*This series has received recognition as a Top 50 Finalist in Photolucida's 2025 Critical Mass, as a Shortlisted Finalist for the Klompching FRESH Award 2025 , and a finalist for the Rhonda Wilson Award 2025