I’m so thrilled that “Fluff” is part of the Singular/Signature Image exhibit jurored by Alyssa Coppelman – a big thank you to Alyssa and Hamidah Glasgow, the executive director of the Center for Fine Art Photography! The show is running at the C4FAP in Fort Collins from March 3rd till April 1st. And if you’re in Colorado, the reception is tonight at 6pm!
I’m so very excited to announce the launch of my first monograph, Blood Line! (so excited I used Bold type which I’ve never done before!)
Kris Graves from Kris Graves Projects in New York contacted me after he saw a preview of my new body of work. He suggested we make a book together. I was a bit stunned – the series wasn’t even completed yet. But he had trust in the work. The past few weeks have been a bit crazy for sure. And today, we have a book! The design is finalised and I love it – I can’t wait for it to be revealed when it is out!
This past year has had its share of really high ups and really low downs for me. This is another moment where I wish my dad were here. My step-mom reminded me the other day of how impressed he was with what I had done with my life and work in the past 18 months – and my dad wasn’t easily impressed. I can just imagine his face had he heard that Blood Line was now also a book! I think he would have been just as excited as I am 🙂
Kris has all the details on his site and we are currently taking pre-orders for the next 30 days. To get your copy, just head over to Blood Line on KGP.
I want to thank Kris for this opportunity. And anyone who will get the book. Really, thank you – what an amazing way it is for me to honor my dad’s memory.
Today I release my latest body of work. I feel many things at the moment, mostly emotions linked to seeing a year’s worth of labour coming to fruition. I am particularly proud of Blood Line. So are my daughters. Working on it together was a shared pleasure, also because we felt connected to my Dad when we did. Right now however I do experience a little tightening of the chest (or is it of the throat?) as the grief is still fresh. But I remind myself that when he saw the photographs a few weeks before his death, he loved them. I wish he were here. I think he would have been proud too.
Blood Line – Artist Statement
Once your parents pass away, you realise you’re next in line. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the tender age of 64. In “Blood Line” I investigate how his inescapable disease and his death also affected my own life. I saw my father’s pain and felt my own. My subjects are my daughters, my flesh and blood, his descendants. He experienced, I processed, they embody.
With this work I address how terminal illness turns our lives upside down and affects communication and identity. When I was with my dad, he and I knew his days were numbered. I was able to say things I might not have shared before, but I also found myself withholding private thoughts. My version of reality and truth shifted. Blood Line illustrates the ensuing coding of language and our morphing sense of Self.
Life as I knew it was radically redefined and my personal definition of a photograph evolved. In much of the work, I altered the surface of my pigment ink prints with the medical supplies that overtook our lives, such as gauze, suture thread, eosin…, even my own blood that I drew from my fingers. I cut the prints with scalpels and tore them by hand. By lineage, I am the literal link between my father and my daughters. Now I am also that link through the work of my hands. A year later, he is gone, and when I am too, the photographs will still be there to connect us all.
Blood Line is a limited edition of 6+2AP.
All photographs below are photographs of the actual prints.
11 months ago my father nearly passed away from extreme complications on his first chemotherapy round. I was visiting him in France when it happened. After a month in the hospital he finally got home. Less than a week later he was taken back by ambulance with a life threatening infection, and as it happens I also was visiting then. The past year has been tough and I wish I could say that it’s been uphill from there. But that particular day with its particular circumstances has possibly branded me the most. I didn’t leave the hospital thinking I would do work about this; but somehow from that time onward I knew I would eventually.
That same week I had finished the Locked-in series. And 2016 can feel like it’s been a lot about getting that project “out there” – in the past fortnight alone I heard I’m in a show in NYC as well as one in Vermont and in the Berlin Foto Biennale (if you want to see what I’ve been up to in more details, you can check the CV I have recently added to my About page). But I actually spent a lot of my time making new work as well. I just haven’t shown any of it yet. So today I’m changing that with this small preview.
My new project is called Blood Line. It’s still growing and so I won’t share much for now. I can tell you that though it’s about terminal illness, it most certainly is not documentary work. You won’t see my father in any of the photographs. I can tell you that it’s been a profound challenge to address universal questions linked to such a personal experience and to do those justice with conceptual photography – but it’s also been an amazing process that I believe has helped me grow. So I hope you feel something with this first photograph of the series that I am sharing today: