These images represent the dark dreams of an aging woman; they are an exploration into my daily fears of being left alone, becoming invisible, and dying before fully living. The ghostly, ethereal self-portraits represent the invisibility I feel in life and expect in death. The symbolic nature of the mirrors, clocks, and hourglasses represents what we fear as we age: the mirror looks different now, the clocks go far too fast, and the sand in the hourglass of our lives can never be flipped over again. Women are often more susceptible to intense, vivid dreams; motherhood and menopause can often intensify this. While perhaps biological in nature, these dreams often feel surreal, deeper, darker, and more mystical, far less fantastical than they were as a child. Perhaps in our dreams, the veil to our subconscious is more permeable. What really happens in our dreams? Where do we go, and why can we not remember?
For this project, conceptual and camera obscura photography serve as a medium for telling my story; the dark room of a camera obscura feels like an investigation into these imaginary places. It is almost otherworldly to see how outside projections dance on the walls in my bedroom. I have long been inspired by the Pictorialist photographers, the original photographic storytellers whose images romanticize their subjects, be it land or people, creating works reminiscent of paintings. By using their soft-focus method and long exposure to create motion blur, I can alter reality and capture an impressionistic representation of what I see in my dreams.
These images are where I imagine I go when I dream. Upon awakening, memories of those dreams quickly become hazy, slipping away like sand through a sieve. I desperately try to remember, but the faces I saw have now disappeared, and the places I went become enveloped in a fog until they become lost in the locked vault of my mind. The objects are symbolic representations of fleeting time, reminders of our mortality, and how someday we will become someone’s memories, forever immortalized in a portrait on the wall.