Artist Statement
“A tiny rock transmuted into a gem”, someone once told me and there are multiple ways through which this quote resonates with my practice. My work both through the medium of photography but also through the research and synaesthetic processes it follows in the background, speaks about this exact minority or triviality that once it’s encountered otherwise, lingers over something deeper.
In my practice, both the rock as a structure signifying the concrete and the solid, but also the fractured and fluid, and the volcanic landscape as a metaphor for impermanence and transformation, are used as my main visual axes. Even if my practice hasn’t been explicitly artistic for the past decade, there was always something that felt intriguing in creating outcomes independent of a request or briefing. How can photography mirror nature’s constant state of flux? How can a representation of volcanic geologies speak about always being in transit?
These are a couple questions raised through my work. Especially when it comes to volcanoes that defy a complete, singular understanding, that they form and they are concurrently formed according to and in touch with their surroundings. Volcanoes escape the forever static. With their unpredictability and energy serve as a living metaphor for human experience; they hold the collective unconscious and build narratives around it. As writer Ricuperati noted, they are “epiphanies that cannot be experienced, they can only be seen.”
This mysterious quality of volcanoes has fascinated me since childhood. My images act as vessels between these mystical, unknown worlds of reality and fantasy, embodying both the ephemeral and the raw power of transformation. What interests me most when photographing them is their temporality—the fleeting moments that mirror our own transitory nature. Photography, for me, is a language, an idiolect that allows me to mouth pain, fear, infantile agonies, yet also pleasure, rapture, love and faith. It’s a medium that can first grasp and then share emotions and experiences, yet also breaks, chasms, in betweens.
Intrinsic part of my practice is also the workshops that I design and lead, through expanding the use of the photographic medium. Each of them focuses on feeling through and utilising the unique light and atmosphere of volcanic areas, transcribing their histories and ambiences. Working with others, observing their gestures, postures and standings with regard to their photographic subject is for me an equally vivid process, another movement towards embracing the constant flow and movement of life.