RESOLUTIONS OF TORMENT (R.O.T) ~ Piper
R.O.T traces a lineage of spectral femininity in photography, extending the 19th and 20th century tradition of spirit photography; an alchemical practice that renders the immaterial visible by interrogating how photographic and moving images negotiate mortality, time, and dissolution.
The feminist framework for this project is rooted in lived experience of my subjects and myself. Through analog techniques, I percieve mystical, ephemeral traces, and/or hauntings. The resulting images are not just an act of portraiture but they become evidence for encounter, memory, intuition, and lingering emotional weight. For those that take part in this ongoing study, we ground the imagery in trust, catharsis, and a shared sensitivity to the unseen.
R.O.T traces a lineage of spectral femininity in photography, extending the 19th and 20th century tradition of spirit photography; an alchemical practice that renders the immaterial visible by interrogating how photographic and moving images negotiate mortality, time, and dissolution.
The feminist framework for this project is rooted in lived experience of my subjects and myself. Through analog techniques, I percieve mystical, ephemeral traces, and/or hauntings. The resulting images are not just an act of portraiture but they become evidence for encounter, memory, intuition, and lingering emotional weight. For those that take part in this ongoing study, we ground the imagery in trust, catharsis, and a shared sensitivity to the unseen.
This work is, in many ways, a form of storytelling. Giving silhouettes, shapes and tones to human experiences that are felt as feelings of longing, disconnection, resiliance and tenderness. These lived realities, while individual, are also collective, and in this place resides the feminist underpinnings of this project. My subject and I create a visual language that honors the complexities of being seen and of seeing someone else in return.
Photography, as both a physical and conceptual medium, may offer a space where absence can assume form, where body becomes imprint. The self, within this, is transfigured across exposures, chemical intervention, and layers, resembling the antithesis to records. Because in the darkroomcan act as metaphor for the unconscious, we may work to reveal what lingers and what haunts. In this space of becoming, the resulting images are never final; they are dissolving and reconstituting self, embodying existence and erasure at once, the two are not related nor exclusive. The resulting prints exist as ruins, as artifacts of this of this transference. From the moment they are brought into form, they begin. The prints themselves emphasize the idea that a ritualistic and intentional performance has occured these prints may serve as symbolic representations of incommunicable spiritual truths. While these rituals may be dramatized or externalized in the production, they still manage to create evidence of a psychological or spiritual state in which the initiation can lead to actual mystical experience (provided the individual and myself is sufficiently prepared for this).
Photography, as both a physical and conceptual medium, may offer a space where absence can assume form, where body becomes imprint. The self, within this, is transfigured across exposures, chemical intervention, and layers, resembling the antithesis to records. Because in the darkroomcan act as metaphor for the unconscious, we may work to reveal what lingers and what haunts. In this space of becoming, the resulting images are never final; they are dissolving and reconstituting self, embodying existence and erasure at once, the two are not related nor exclusive. The resulting prints exist as ruins, as artifacts of this of this transference. From the moment they are brought into form, they begin. The prints themselves emphasize the idea that a ritualistic and intentional performance has occured these prints may serve as symbolic representations of incommunicable spiritual truths. While these rituals may be dramatized or externalized in the production, they still manage to create evidence of a psychological or spiritual state in which the initiation can lead to actual mystical experience (provided the individual and myself is sufficiently prepared for this).