the gruesome and the beautiful

An ongoing series done in the alternative photographic process lumen prints, also known as "solar-grams". 

During this project early on, I learned how unforgiving that star is. My skin burned with each new work I created and in some ways, I found each session to be just as torturous as the last. This body of work addresses beauty, but also violence. Lumen prints enable a process of romanticizing harshness and death through heat and light. In the name of beauty, desire, and will, I subjected myself to this experience. In a similar vein it reflects the realities of being under the male gaze, constant surveillance, and exhaustingly being fetishized once stepping out into the light.

Womanhood is lovely, but it is also difficult. 

These are my likenesses, but the moments before public display. 

"She was violently treated by ultraviolet beams to give her that color, that beauty. She sews herself back together with strands of herself as a will to simply exist amongst man."