Pocket was created during a time of great movement across continents, when all that surrounded me felt too alien for words. The process of constructing these scenes was simply a way to forge out a safe place in the world - a cathartic exercise, if you will. I began to compulsively build tent like structures, imagining them to be places in which I could take shelter along my travels. I think of pocket as a small and quiet offering to the viewer. That is to say, I hope that the photographs function as pockets for other people too: small isolated places that you can fill, bound on the edges so that you won’t fall out.
These types of exercises grow out of my interest in exploring new ways of realizing the self within unstable spaces. If the world were no longer fixed in to it’s familiar shape; if the map were to become a blank space; if all the lines of all the old stories were erased - how would we locate ourselves? I am attracted to the conception of a self that is in continuous motion, which no longer needs still-points, fixed narrations or stable structures - in other words, the possibility of absolute fluidity as a viable mode of being. Of course, when one begins to consider possibilities, there is also the inevitable and terrifying awareness of impossibility. My work is equally concerned with, or perhaps driven by, a sense of terror at the prospects of the new - the uncertainty of the unknown. I draw from the curious tension between the desire to move and to explore; and the simultaneous attachment to static, stable and comfortable spaces. It is an ambivalent relationship to fixedness and fluidity; structure and chaos; meaning and meaninglessness; belonging and exclusion; home and homelessness. It is a simultaneous grasping and letting go of the familiar.
