I’ve been building these images like offerings saturated, opalescent, raw, real but almost too beautiful to be trusted. A “force de la nature” with all my heart.

Self-portraits and still lifes collapse into each other: a body wrapped in a fragile, invented skin, moving, blurring; objects seen through glass, magnified, bent out of truth.

Teeth from a possum. A mandible. Flowers carried from Paris. Mushrooms. Eggshells.

Fragments that feel sacred, but also unsettled.

Arranged as gestures of giving

Small offerings, little negotiations. Maybe gifts to deities.

An altar is where we place what we believe is above us.

A constructed height. A chosen devotion.

A place not only to honor and worship, but to offer

To give something of ourselves in exchange for meaning, protection, what our heart desires, or return. Maybe slight variations of offerings could create different outcomes so we keep on giving. Maybe this time it will work.

But what happens when we place a person there?

Or ourselves?

Perspective shifts. From below, everything looks certain, monumental, almost divine.

But that distance distorts. It erases error, hides fracture, opposes the ordinary weight of being human.

And still, we do it.

To fill a void.

To steady ourselves.

To believe in something not hesitant, resolute. A deity, a saint, a God.

Sometimes we do it because we don’t believe in ourselves.

But no one holds that position for long.

Not heroes, not lovers, not idols, not even the self.

They fall. We fall.

And in that collapse, reality returns

imperfect, broken, human, real, painful.

These images sit in that space:

between reverence and illusion,

between what we elevate, what we offer symbolically,

and what inevitably breaks.

Always. Everything breaks, always.

So all the gifts begin to fade.

Those that were given like a “ force de la nature”

Disappear to nothing.

Everything breaks, somehow, somewhere, always.