Water Body (mixed media)

2023
Vermont Studio Center
photography / mixed media / in progress

I first presented this series during “Vermont Week” Open Studios at my residency at the Vermont Studio Center, where I began experimenting with handmade marks layered with photographic prints. Building on themes from my Water Mother work, this series explores the elemental flow between body, grief, and water, reframed through drawing and painting.

I used white pigment to trace currents of energy through darkened fields of paper, overlaying them with blurred photographic stills from my body in motion. These interventions emphasize the charged presence of “negative space”—what in Japanese aesthetics is known as ma, not merely emptiness but the living interval between forms. Here, space itself becomes generative, annihilatory, and alive.

The resulting images situate the body within a continuum of dissolution and renewal, asking how form emerges from void, and how grief and vitality travel together through unseen currents. As a work in progress, Water Body marks a return to hand-drawn gesture as a counterpart to my film and installation practice.