It is, Still
It is, Still (2009)
30x30 and 25x30 c-prints
This series explores how much a portrait is able to communicate about an interior emotional state. The unnatural frozen poses and expressions of the figures can be read as that of 'grace' in the divine presence, or conversely as an existential state of despair. Kierkegaard calls despair ‘the sickness unto death’, and attributes it to our unbearable separation from God. Both these psychological conditions involve a profound absence, a distance from the self. The presence of the person is still there, but the mind is gone. In the same way, these portraits show a person, life-size, which we are free to scrutinise closely, and yet any 'truth' or connection with them is denied, and they remain only faint echoes; still images.
