Still Unfolding

“I feel your passion and internal need for expressing yourself through art. The great thing is that despite your complex technique, you are not using the technique for the sake of the technique. Your technique remains the conduit to express your feelings and thoughts to the audience, you have a strong understanding or obsession with the actual content of your story.”

Revisiting words from an art submission critique as I sit with this image. Ones that made me feel deeply seen and helped me understand my creative style a little better, by putting words to the things I feel. Referring back to feedback like this is like refocusing on the heart of my creative work.

Technique

One specific technique used here was a prism, and really was the starting place for this image. My favorite thing about using a prism for my base images is how it can combine different points of view of a landscape into one image, in ways that are both constructed (in that they are not observable in this exact way with our senses) and also true (in that it is capturing how the landscapes actually look, just in unexpected ways – in a different configuration).

Story

This visual metaphor helps me to explore feelings of belonging, or lack there of. It helps me express a feeling of being in separate ‘landscapes’ in my creative work. Part photography. But as I explore more techniques that morph the images into what looks like paintings, I feel just on the outskirts of the photography community. Part therapist. I’m always wanting to return to this work despite my dissatisfaction with certain aspects of it. As I practice more bringing that lens into my creative work, I feel a desire for those conversations though just on the outskirts of the therapy community.

But, perhaps, these categories are as constructed as they are true. Though it feels a little lonely at times, each time I lean full on into this combination I feel my heart expand just a little more. And I tell myself again, keep going.

You are not what you think, you are the unknown
You still have everything that you have overgrown.
– Lindsay Lou, Go There Alone