bovarysme – A disposition towards escapist day dreaming in which one imagines oneself as a heroine or hero of a romance and refuses to acknowledge everyday realities. -The Oxford Dictionary
This work speaks to the isolation felt during the pandemic and heightened by our fraught political and social landscape. I’ve been thinking about the notion of time, and how slow and surreal days can seem, particularly as darkness comes and winter sets in. Prolonged domesticity can be claustrophobic, yet living within myself is also a consolation, allowing me to delve deep into a universe of my own making. I have found solace in making self portraits that take place in an unspecified time, allowing me to weave together thoughts about home, isolation, longing and memories. This project is about evasion and about creating a fantasy life. It is also about disappearing.
I’ve been reading and looking at a lot of art, notably the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, and Andrew Wyeth. They have all inspired this project.
Making these photographs is a means of escape for me, a way to slip into another world.