I’ve been sitting with a feeling of vulnerability in my work lately. It’s a combination of things. I’ve started writing from a more personal perspective again. I’m making photographs that feel raw and uncomfortable in how much I’m letting show. I’m divided between honesty and fear.
I find that, without consciously intending to, I keep splitting myself open into images and onto pages, spilling out all the things that go unseen and unsaid. There’s a price to holding everything inside and a price for speaking your truth, but given the choice now, I’m taking the latter. These feelings need somewhere to live that isn’t tensed into my muscles, but the trade-off is the opposite of what my overprotective brain thinks is safe, where safety means keeping small and never upsetting anyone.
To some degree, this open expression has always been there. My photography tutor, nearly 10 years ago, frequently described my work as evocative, though I was never intentionally seeking that. As Sylvia Plath once said, “I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely”.
And really, what a beautiful thing it is to be able to transmute these feelings into another form.
Art and nature are the closest things to magic that I know. The alchemy of transformation, of distilling something down to its core and then giving it a new shape, still feels like a mystery. I can tell you how to set a camera to the right exposure, how to compose a frame, how to edit shadows in Lightroom. What I can’t teach you is how to pour yourself into it, open enough that the camera sees deeper. The unintended and uncontrolled elements are so often where the magic lives – the underexposed, blurred, missed focus, imbalanced frames, the in-between, the messiness, the imperfection. The right photos are boring, technically correct, yes, but missing soul. Which seems like a strange thing to say, because on the surface, there appears to be so much restraint in my work, something held so tightly. The currents run deep beneath it.
Art, I think, meets us in the in-between. It sits in the contradictions of the self. I am both restrained and spilling over, conscious and unconscious all at once. It’s the pull between trained art skills and intuitive practice, and a tension between what I am comfortable showing the world and what the art demands. What more can we ask as humans trying to communicate the experience of being human than to have a practice that lives in the unresolved?
There have been many times that I have wished I were less sensitive, that I didn’t feel so much, and wasn’t affected by everything so deeply. But the trade-off for that would be losing the thing that makes my art possible. The deep observation and connection to everything around me and my tangible reaction to emotion mean my practice is more intuitive than thinking or analytical. It allows me to tap into a visceral form of creating where the expression draws directly from the act of feeling. Often, I don’t know where the work is going until after it’s made, the creation is how I come to understand it. Sometimes I never reach that point, and it stays hidden, even to me. The key is to let it flow honestly, even when it feels vulnerable and exposed, but also to know which work to share and which to create just for myself.
Understanding all of this doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. The vulnerability is still there, the discomfort of being seen, the risk of being too open, the exhaustion that comes from feeling everything. There are still moments where I want to pull everything back in, to keep it safe and contained. This tension isn’t something to fix or find balance in, but a way of acknowledging and holding all sides. The splitting open, the holding back, the instinct to protect and the need to express, all existing at once.