Artist’s statement
A life begins and ends with breath. Yet even after one person takes their last breath, others continue to breathe. I think about the continuity created by these finite lives as they follow one another. In Eternal Breath, I project this image of breath onto the ever-changing forms of clouds.
Clouds form, disperse and take on new shapes. Outlines that briefly become distinct soon fade, and new forms appear where others have disappeared. In this movement, I sense a vitality that differs from our own way of living. By vitality, I do not mean that clouds are living organisms. I mean the force I sense in their capacity to change, move and give rise to new forms. Looking at clouds lets me step briefly outside our familiar sense of time and way of seeing, and pay attention to how they change.
With a pinhole camera, I bring the sky, whose depth is difficult to gauge, onto the flat surface of a photograph. During the exposure, light and the movement of clouds are recorded together in a single frame. Changes that pass before our eyes one after another appear in the photograph as a single image. The image holds not only the shapes of clouds but also the time in which they linger and disperse. Subtle changes in light and the surrounding environment also help shape the image. The pinhole camera allows this passage of time to take form as an image.
The photographs that emerge from this process offer a different sensory experience from the sky I saw before me. Through this difference, I seek to explore movements and textures of time that our habitual ways of seeing may overlook. The clouds in a photograph appear momentarily still, yet ceaseless change has shaped their forms. The breath I want to express lies where continuity and disappearance can be sensed together within a single form.
In Eternal Breath, eternity does not mean that a single form remains unchanged. It is closer to a continuity in which individual breaths and forms come to an end while others follow. By photographing the changing clouds, I create a place from which to contemplate that continuity. Before these images, I seek to sense a presence that moves at a different pace from our own and explore the possibility of a dialogue with it.
