Artist Statement

My self-portrait practice began when illness altered the ground of my existence. Pain and weakness transformed the body into an unstable territory and consciousness into a field of intensities. In that altered state, I encountered what I later called a hunger for eternity: a force that pressed against the limits of the self and sought to dissolve them. The scream I felt was not metaphorical. It was an ontological pressure that demanded form.

Photography became the means by which I could test that pressure. The camera did not merely document the body; it probed the threshold between interior and exterior, between the finite and what seemed to exceed it. Self-portraiture became a question: What remains of the self when the body falters, and what appears when the self tries to cross beyond itself?

The forest soon became part of that inquiry. It functioned less as a location than as a second consciousness: a witness, a partner, and, at times, a destination. There were moments when dissolution seemed possible. One winter afternoon, when my body could no longer stand, I lay on the frozen ground and felt no fear. A woodpecker landed nearby and studied me with a calm that felt ancient. In that stillness, I understood that the self could imagine its disappearance not as an ending but as a transformation.

Two years of treatment followed. During that time I returned to the photographs in search of evidence: Was the scream visible? Could the camera register the passage between pain and transcendence? The images became documents of an ontological experiment. They traced the body’s negotiations with finitude and its impulse toward the infinite.

I am now in remission. When I returned to the forest, it was as though I had returned from exile. I continue to work through the self-portrait, though without urgency or obsession. The body poses its questions. The camera records its hypotheses. The forest offers conditions under which the experiment can continue.