Chamber of Light

Chamber of Light transforms a darkened studio into a camera obscura, where an inverted city enters the intimate space of caregiving. Through light, movement and duration, the work explores motherhood as an altered experience of time, self and space.

Chamber of Light began during my first year of motherhood, when the rhythms of caregiving fundamentally changed my experience of time, space, and my own sense of self.

During an artist residency in Jersey City, I transformed my studio into a camera obscura, sealing the windows and allowing the outside world to enter through a small aperture. The surrounding city appeared upside down across the walls, floor, and objects inside the room. I brought into this darkened space the things that had come to define my everyday life—a play mat, toys, a high chair, a bed—and spent time there with my son.

I began photographing within this environment, using long exposures to register movements that the eye could not hold. My son's body sometimes multiplies or disappears; mine becomes blurred, doubled, fragmented, or reduced to a shadow. At other moments, one of us is absent altogether, leaving only the objects and spaces associated with care. Rather than documenting motherhood directly, I became interested in how photography might embody the altered temporality of motherhood: repetition and interruption, intimacy and exhaustion, presence and disappearance.

The camera obscura became more than a photographic device. Its inversion mirrored the perceptual shift I was experiencing as a new mother. The city continued outside, yet much of my life had contracted into the intimate radius of caring for another person. By bringing the exterior world physically into that space, the work collapses boundaries between outside and inside, public and domestic, mother and artist.

Chamber of Light has since expanded into moving image and installation, extending its exploration of motherhood beyond the photographic frame. Through light, duration, and shifting forms of presence, I explore motherhood not as a fixed identity, but as a state of continual transformation—one in which the self does not simply disappear, but is repeatedly rearranged.