Carved in Light

Human: A metaphor

If art is a metaphor for life, then is it possible to transform the essence of life into a metaphor? I often recall a photograph I took of a monk sitting under the eaves of a temple, his tranquility resembling a flower in bloom. The interesting thing is, we often identify a work as a piece of art because it reminds us of something about humanity. However, people are rarely used to represent other objects.

In this body of work, I strove to photograph the human body and depict it as representing other things. For example, I photographed a human hand so as to illustrate a bare, silhouetted back, and a human palm and fingers to telegraph the idea of a landscape. I also depicted a person as a Roman sculpture. Even though sculptures are typically objects made to resemble a human beings, I found the process of reversing this tradition fascinating. By transforming an image to reflect what we don’t expect, I’m able to challenge those expectations, to ask why we have those perceived notions in the first place. Likewise, I chose elements from the natural world such as trees, flowers, and ice and used them to mimic parts of the human form such as eyes, a dress, or even facial expressions.