Can you hold death like your own? Exhibition.

Can you hold death like your own?

This work was created 6 months ago when I lost my mother. In the work I deal with the anguish of losing someone I love and close to me. This series is a triptych made up of three emotionally charged and raw large format images.

A year and half ago I left South Africa to come live in Norway. In this move I left my mother who also happens to be a devout African shaman.

It was a hard letting her go, yet in my heart I made peace with it, I felt it was the right step to do.

The plan a week before she passed away in June, which was winter in South Africa, was that, she’d come and share the summer with us in Norway.

I knew she was physically weak but we still hoped that she’d be strong again and spend more time with us.

The week I heard the news I was left with a painful feeling of being pierced with a sword.

I had never felt such pain before…

Being a photographer and a poet, photographing the experience and writing about it were my first instinct in my journey to survival and healing.

So began the series, Can you hold death like your own?

The title came to me, in that waking state, the periphery between the dream and wakefulness. This state is my spring and a drinking well which I’ve become well acquainted with this secret place, and it fills my burning soul with many marvelous musings.

The message came a year ago, at the time the lightning struck; there was a sense of curiosity and fear about the line. Then my first thought was it was a herald for my new body of work. But the still the wonder, what it meant beyond the obvious still remained. How will I approach such a daunting topic…? How will I hold death?

I have a hunch; I have a hunch now that Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t totally being insane when he cut his own ear off.

The cutting of his ear happened at a critical time, when the man was going through a lot of pain in his life. He had fallen in love with his step sister which at the time was a big taboo and the painter was very poor.

Unfortunately this woman didn’t want to love him back, and this brought strife and heartbreak.

Vincent‘s screaming sun sunflower work is much like Munch’s  famous Scream, in that both are very emotive and expressionistic in articulating the dark emotions of anguish.

Pain is an emotional, transient yet felt physically. The difference between being really pierced by a sword and losing someone, is that the wound is different. The one is seen and felt. To relate to this emotion is both a physical and psychological while the other is mostly felt with equal intensity psychologically .This creates the challenge of dealing with an unseen force.

I remember the image that plagued my mind in the time of her death, I had this overwhelming visual feeling of drowning and wanting to drown myself. I often would even picture it.

So I saw this as a guideline to the feeling, what I did was try to recapture this feeling of drowning in an image as a way of materializing the emotion. That way I could face demon in a way.

 

First I started by making a simple set up of the camera on the tripod on self timer. I went on to recreate the experience of drowning my by using a plastic bag to suffocate myself.

The first images I took of myself were somewhat fake.

I was afraid…

Then I thought if I’m going to be true, I’ll have to be true.

I then proceeded to suffocate myself to the point that I lost consciousness.

I remember the buzzing of a train passing my head at fast speed as I resurfaced back to the ocean of waking consciousness after having fallen to the ground.

Stumbling back on my feet I continued determinately. Passing out had led me to a door, in it I realized where my physical edge was. Knowing this I then understood the measure of my resilience.

Having learnt it I went to learn how to control it.

My motivation was I can’t be found dead in my kitchen, on camera.

Taking pictures when suffocating to death, seconds seem stretch to hours.

Between one self timed shot to the next

and each time I did this for 10 seconds

over and over again.

Until I could touch the pain I was feeling inside, physically concentrated in one moment in one photograph. Until it was real.

Until it was true to me, held on camera.

 

My hunch is this is the point that Van Gogh cuts off his ear; it was a way of accessing the physical state of his emotion. In the same way people can turn to slitting their wrists when pain gets too overwhelming. This is also the same way Edward Munch’s torture of living alone above the haunting butchery and listening to the suffering slaughter of animals, led him to paint the scream as a way of projecting his mind , transforming his feeling and transcending his pain.

 

Before I left Norway to bury my mother I got an invitation to show my work in a photography exhibition. The exhibition was titled Now in four rooms.

The exhibition concept was about artists sharing the work and issues they were working with at that moment.

At the wonderful offer to take part I gladly took the chance. My work was unlike anything I had ever made before, in that I hadn`t explored making self portraits. It was also revolutionary to me in that I was facing new emotions and head on, face to face with no veil and using my tool as a scalpel.

This work became groundbreaking for me in that my photography had been about capturing a subject, something outside of me to actualize and depict what was inside.

To achieve this I exercised the ideology and vision that I’m in separately one with the universe and hence all subject matter.

Yet, still whatever I was photographing was not physically me.

I can explore a subject to some extent but never completely, Exploration discovery is a continual projection of the infinite mind. This is the nature of perception too.

It is the extension of the self and the union with subject matter.

I think this is essentially oxymoron of  perception. It is a creation of my minds’s project ion and the    expanding of reality.

but when I photograph another physical body I’m not photographing Russel the self, I’m photographing someone else or another object though it may represent me in being nature.

 

In doing this I began to understand that my experience of death although was not unique, to me it was. It was my personal experience of it, and so I had to deal with it myself and face it individually therefore I had to photograph myself.

The development from this project was it also revolutionized the way I worked with color because I wasn’t interested in following rules, but my main aim was in articulating truthfully a deep true emotion, and essentially surviving the experience.

This project gave birth to a project titled I am prism in which I pushed these methods further.