SACRED SELF PORTRAIT
2007-Current
What you’ll find on this page is a series of photographs that are the result of a decade-long journey through self portraiture that began one day when I was experiencing a depth of emotion that I didn’t know how to navigate. I felt pain and I didn’t have words or a safe space to express and so, I picked up a little point and shoot camera, switched it into timer mode, and began to photograph myself.
That Fall, I was fortunate to have childcare for my children and so I took the opportunity to attend one semester of art foundation courses at a university. Between my classes, I would sit in the art library and read about people in our history who shaped our world by following the artist’s path. Sally Mann described her work as a photographic inquiry and reading those words made me stop to think about what I had been doing with my little camera. I was drawn to the work because it gave me a path to inquire; a way to live into the questions in my life without necessarily needing to work my way through to an answer. And so, I began an intentional path of inquiry.
It would be years and uphill striving and burning down and falling apart before I would find the bravery to walk into a psychiatrist’s office and accept his suggested Bipolar I diagnosis. It would be years of struggling with mood swings and compulsive thoughts and suicidality and irrational behavior before I would begin to unravel the story of the psychological abuse I had experienced as a child. It would be years before I learned about dissociation and embodiment and start to understand how the process of creating the art had become a coping mechanism, a secret garden, a way to pull my consciousness into the body, a way to turn my inner experience into something tangible, a way to work in the subterranean depths of consciousness without a defining narrative.
Self portraiture never ceases to surprise me with the questions it creates or the truths it brings to the surface. Through this work, I tested my bravery, my fortitude, my vulnerability, my curiosity, my authenticity, and the boundaries of my heart.
If there’s one thing I’ve come to believe in through the course of this work, it’s the importance of self honesty. The things we hide from ourselves don’t disappear. What we run from holds us hostage.
