THE THING THAT YOU ARE

2019

You may not run away from the thing that you are because it comes and comes and comes
as sure as you breathe. As certain. The thing is deep inside your linings, way down in the marrow.
People have a lot of words for it. There are ten thousand names for it and you.

Yrsa Daley-Ward, The Terrible: a storyteller’s memoir

At an early age I internalized the idea that I contained within me some powerful wickedness capable of causing me and those around me great harm. A childhood spent in a conservative religious community has given me a destructive relationship with my body. I learned to fear my body, to hate it for its round excesses and its dangerous power I couldn’t control. Even while I yearned to be beautiful, wanted, and loved, I punished myself for vanity, selfishness, and promiscuity. My body felt like a curse spread through the eyes and the skin. Despite my rejection of the religious community in which I was raised, it is only now, almost a decade later, that I’ve recognized the fragments of misogyny that remain within me. These bits of patriarchal shrapnel persistently dictate my attitudes and behaviors towards my own body. They rise in silence to punish me again and again for daring to exist within a body that is, they say, sinful by its very nature. Through the photograms that make up the series, The Thing That Your Are, I explore this complex relationship. 

Each composition is intuitively created in the darkroom using images of my own and other female bodies paired with objects of measurement or containment. The digitally printed transparencies form layers over light sensitive paper and are then exposed to light and developed using traditional silver gelatin processing. The prints allow my invisible insides; thoughts, feelings, and the unconscious, to be transposed onto my skin. The whispers inside fade a little more each time I make visible the unseen remnants of internalized misogyny that poison my relationship with my body and myself.