Where Are You Going?

A study on searching for what's no longer here, and seeing it in everything that is.

Coming to terms with my own mortality is something I think about every day. What happens after you die? Where do you go? I've always considered myself to be spiritual, not just because it temporarily alleviates the anxiety of existing, but when you see someone die, the world around you appears so much greater than it did before. I held my father's hand as he took his last breath and the moment he was gone, the entire room shifted. Angelic light flooded through the blinds and I simultaneously felt the world spinning fast and my body become rigid, almost stone like, forgetting it could move. I realized I was terrified I'd already begun to forget what he looked like.

This event became the catalyst for my work and myself as a person, obsessively orchestrating the way I navigate the world. I am forever trying to find different ways of connecting with not only what surrounds me, but my father too. The orange glow at dusk, or trying to touch the sun as it escapes beyond the mountain. Could he be found in the speckles of light cascading across someones body? Or is he the pattern created by the birds as they fly overhead? I'm constantly searching for portals and creating small vessels of photographs that act as a gateway to him, and what lies beyond here.

My biggest fear has been that as more space is created between myself and his death, the less I'll remember of him. The sound of his voice, how tall he was, what his hands looked like. As I go through the photographs I've been making for the last decade, and will continue to make in search of him, I am able to see the spaces in which he continues to exist. The world appears differently when it's veiled by the daunting presence of mortality. Studying the way the light reflects in the mirror on the wall, or the vast, open landscape and the way the horizon sometimes creates a jagged line across the world, splitting it in two. The way the clothes hang and act as surrogates for those they belong to. These are the ways I will continue to search for those who are gone, while asking myself everyday, where are you going?