Kekulé's Dream

Like photographs, dreams communicate through symbols, often visualizing otherwise unseen and immeasurable truths. Kekulé's Dream explores the tension between imagination and knowledge through a series of photographs featuring a group of traditional healers and their sacred surroundings.

Like photographs, dreams communicate through symbols, often visualizing otherwise unseen and immeasurable truths. In my series, Kekulé's Dream, I explore the tension between imagination and knowledge through a series of photographs featuring a group of traditional healers called the Sangomas and their sacred surroundings. Over a series of trips to the Free State province of South Africa, I learned to be open to myriad forms of reality from the Sangomas and express this openness of interpretation through my photographs.

To the Sangomas, dreams carry essential knowledge. They are a medium for communication with our ancestors and a pathway to healing. While creating this body of work, I was often looking for things that could act as a mirror of their belief system. As a result, the images in the series do not include individual portraits but often depict artifacts and engravings that symbolize a holistic approach, as well as rituals or ceremonies. I also found that photography lent itself well to expressing these ideas. Like a series of photographs, dreams are characterized by brief flashes from fractured memories. Similarly to a dream, these images are open to multiple interpretations, and it is ultimately up to the viewer to create coherence and meaning.