DANCING WITH MY SHADOW

Woman Embracing Her Inner Self

Subjected to a lifetime of societal pressures, including gender roles as well as arbitrary standards of beauty and youth, a woman’s identity is submerged. Pushed ever deeper, her self-worth becomes only a shadow of itself.
“Dancing With My Shadow” represents a woman’s struggle to find her essence and not merely set it free, but to embrace and celebrate it: to “dance” with that shadow.

This series is done in the spirit of, and indebted to, Haboku (“flung ink”) employed in Chinese and Japanese suiboku painting, where the artist applies black ink on a light canvas. It is defined by its spontaneity and simplicity. The emotion of these abstract images, each of which was captured in the moment, is found in their varied tones and contrasts of dark and light. They are the direct expressions of that inner essence. The choice of abstract photographic imagery is not only to convey the “shadows“ in the theme of this series, but also to create an open space for the viewer as each photograph gradually reveals itself.