artist statement
“i think that life is just about returning to yourself” — tiya, “#34” (Substack)
In my last year before turning thirty, I wanted to find my way back to center. I spent the early years of the pandemic losing myself. There’s the universal grief that all of us share from those first years of the pandemic, but somewhere along the way I felt like I sacrificed big pieces of myself without meaning to. I started shrinking myself until I was smaller than I’d ever been, and for most of my mid-twenties, I wondered if I’d lost everything that made me me. How much of this disconnection was due to the pandemic and how much of it was due to my age? Everyone talks about the Saturn Return in your late-twenties, but can we really blame the stars for our discontent?
The first step towards reconnecting with my inner self was to face myself. The camera is an unflinching witness, an unbiased companion, and for years now I’d been avoiding her. Her my reflection? Her my lens? Her my self? Self-portraits have always been a way for me to see myself as an outside observer. They allow me to immortalize who I am at a given moment, even if I don’t feel confident. Especially if I do feel confident. But I’ve never tracked myself so consistently over the course of twelve months.
I often document myself indirectly. Through books read or songs listened to or films seen. I have always documented myself by photographs captured, but most of these hundreds of thousands of photos are of things and people outside myself. Self-portraits teach you the importance of immortalizing yourself, but they also teach you craft and camera techniques. I wanted to stare into my own soul, but I also wanted to grow as an artist. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to learn things. I wanted to stop standing still.
Over the course of a year, I learned that sometimes the only thing you can do is stand in front of the mirror and look at who you are now. There is no shame in your reflection, no shame in trying something only to fail miserably, no shame in looking like you haven’t taken care of your body in days. The more shame I let go of, the more I was forced to contend with who I am now rather than who I was or who I wished I could be, the more at peace I became. I learned to see myself more clearly, to forgive myself, to listen to myself.
I can never go back to who I was five years ago, and now I’m at a place where I can admit that I wouldn’t want to. I sacrificed a lot and lost things I never wanted to part with, but I also became something bigger and better and brighter than I could have imagined back then. And so many of the things I thought were gone forever - the pieces of myself that disappeared during a global pandemic, or during my late-twenties - have been replanted somewhere new. They are still sprouting, waiting for enough sunlight to return to their former splendor.
In each of these portraits, I see past versions of me. Who I was throughout my twenty-ninth year, but more importantly, all the versions of me that brought me here. I see all the ways I’ve changed, and all the ways I’m still hoping to change as time goes on. I see love for myself that I thought I’d given up on. I see that all the loathing I felt for myself at thirteen has fizzled and faded away into nothingness after all this time.
This project has reminded me who I am, but more importantly, it’s shown me that who I was is still within me. Nothing is ever lost in this life, it’s simply repurposed. And if it’s meant to stay with you, it will come back to you. Even your sense of self.
— DEC 2024
