Artist Statement

As a child, my family would joke that I was always off in my own world. It was a gentle jest and spoken with love, however as I grew this sense of spaciness grew with me. I often found myself feeling removed from reality, feeling distant and as though I was watching the world as opposed to being an active participant. My first year of university I learned of dissociation, a coping mechanism formed out of traumatic experience that causes one to disconnect from themselves and the world around them. This project was created as a means of reconciling with and giving physical form to this aspect of my life, and hopefully bringing a sense of understanding to those who do not experience it.

In the images you see a ghost taking place of the self, exhibiting the sense of distance and removal an individual experiencing a dissociative episode. To further this disconnect, I physically painted the ghosts onto prints of the photographs, bringing them out of the photograph and into the material plane.