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Names are powerful. They create shared dialog and understanding. Like a scientist examining a world through panes of glass, names put a container around the unknown, allowing us to see from many angles. In 2017 my bipolar diagnosis opened up a vocabulary for my experience. It created a focal point for self-examination that felt both devastating and comforting.

Mood stabilizers tempered the wildness and confidence that came with mania. Life was redefined through experimentation: The structure of lists and charts and emergency contacts. Psychologists, insomnia, manageable side effects. Questioning whether progress was an illusion created by brain chemistry. Looking for patterns. Iterating and evolving. Embracing curiosity, stillness, and tenuous hope. Redefining what it means to be stable.

I began forging a road forward—with photography giving tangible form to my reflections on identity, belonging, the impact of physical space, and the feelings that exist beyond words.

Observing, accepting, integrating each piece into the whole. These images show the process of becoming.

The world takes us on a journey, sometimes by choice and more often in spite of ourselves. Art provides a space to share and investigate our personal narratives. It is a mirror through which otherness becomes known and empowered. Fears and imperfections find a home in the people and places we see in print and on the screen. We are changed, able to see more clearly. Emerging stronger and more awake.

This body of work is ongoing.

“A large number of studies in the past few decades support a link between creativity and mental illnesses, particularly manic depressive disorder and schizophrenia [which] forces us to reexamine our attitudes towards the mental states that we call “diseased”...If mental illness can produce powerful and important art, then perhaps, instead of trying to eliminate them by medication, we should embrace these mental states as valuable in their own right.”
—Adrienne Sussman, Sanford Journal of Neuroscience, Volume I, Issue 1, Fall 2007