“In my series What it Means to Be Here (2018 – ongoing), I capture the intimacy between non-heterosexual women with a sense of ordinariness and reverence for sex, pleasure, and desire, with agency, honesty, and spontaneity. Through this work, I call into question the historic photographic erasure of lesbian representation.
My use of light and shadow generates a tension between the known and unknown as I often cut the body’s signifier from its signified. This creates fragments of perceived union and allows for space to open up for new possibilities of being seen and represented as a queer/lesbian woman. The shadows also function as a blurring of boundaries, opening opportunities for desire and wonder. I often challenge the constraints of the frame by using various technical strategies in which I disrupt the normative gaze in order to reimagine and reclaim a distinct, lesbian gaze. When creating in-camera collages of bodies and other objects within a space, I point out the androgyny and gender “signifiers” of some of my subjects, inevitably challenging the bi-polarization of gender identity.
