Soft Resistance: Studies in Form

A study in how tenderness can hold power. Through portraiture and movement-based image-making, I explore softness as resistance; how Black bodies command space through quiet gesture, ritual, and light.

My work moves between photography and film to explore embodiment, intimacy, and there is power in being tender. I’m drawn to how stillness, movement, and light can communicate presence and how form itself becomes a kind of language. My images often use fabric, sculptural props, and pared-down environments to hold the body as both structure and feeling, revealing the subtle tensions between control and surrender.

In recent years, my practice has expanded from natural light portraiture into a self-directed studio practice that merges movement and image-making. I often collaborate with dancers, particularly through pole dance; a form I treat not only as performance, but as ritual. This work reframes pole as a site of power, tenderness, and self-possession; it resists reduction and stigma, asking viewers to witness softness as command.

Across both still and moving images, I’m developing an evolving visual series titled 8 Visual Studies in Form. It’s not a single body of work, but a framework; a living study in how the body shapes and is shaped by its environment. Works like “Ornamental Quiet,” “Form as a Language,” and “From an Ocean to a Lake” explore presence through sculptural composition and light, while Morphing Together extends this inquiry into film; translating stillness and tension into collective movement.

This grant would allow me to deepen my technical fluency and sustain my ongoing exploration of form; building new studio-based works that expand photography beyond documentation into a meditative space of self-discovery. I want to continue crafting images that hold the complexity of softness, showing how our bodies, in motion or in stillness, can command space quietly, yet vibrantly.

Additional note: This project also includes ongoing short movement film works such as The Space Between Where Everything Stays (2025) and Ode to a Lonely World (2024). Together, these works expand my inquiry into movement and ritual; using pole dance and contemporary performance to explore intimacy, endurance, and the quiet authority of the body.