Impermanence

I have been emotionally empowered my whole life.

We all attach meaning to the things around us, layering our emotional experience over what is actually there. I have always noticed when I am doing it, and I photograph whatever I am doing it to.

What I am looking for is a moment when the people or things around me are so grounded in their own energy, so completely themselves, that the impermanence falls away. These things are everywhere, every day — it is our minds that make them hard to take in.

Most of these stay photographs. A photograph holds the thing I noticed, but not always why it mattered.

A piece goes further — into a drawing, and sometimes into a block — when I can get at what was shaping my perception at the time. Sometimes that is a commentary on the state of the world. Sometimes it is how I was coping in that period: depression, anxiety, substances, meditation. I work the lens of that time over the subject, so the print carries the thing and the way I saw it.

Gratitude for the world, and everything in it, is mostly a practice. Making the work is how I keep practising — training my own attention, and other people's, to centre the beauty that is already there.

I want people to feel a calm unfamiliarity in familiar subjects.