How often do you let yourself be reborn anew? How often do you challenge your comfort zone, truly – not for show but because you feel that you are ready to stretch, or you need to grow, or you cannot fit in the body that contains you any longer? How often do you attempt the impossible? How often do you let yourself die to be renewed?

Rebirth. It is always on my mind. I want to be a thousand people in this lifetime, not just one. I want to learn everything about the things I love so that I can find more things to love and more things to learn. I want to shed the veil that drips off my face as life goes by so that I can find something new to hide behind, and a new way of shedding it.

When I create I am reborn. Most artists are, I think. You make something that defines who you are, and then it is outside of you, gone, taken by others who would view it or love it or hate it. That is the catharsis of creating: knowing that a piece of yourself is released. You can move on to a different piece while someone else digests what you have just lost, or given away, or gladly seen go.

Perhaps the saddest, or most distressing thing that I talk to people about is the danger of growth. We may not use those exact words, but everywhere I travel to I have conversations with new friends and old who tell me that the thing they want most is out of reach. They tell me all of the reasons why. They tell me how badly they want it. I tell them to get it. And a year goes by and I talk to that person again, and those fears have crept back in, and that dream is still dreaming.

Because, as I have witnessed too many times, one day you will wake up and realize you are the same person you were ten years ago. And that person might have been nice ten years ago, but that person is old and stale and boring. That person should have died long ago. And you regret that you didn’t take chances, and you regret that you have let too much time build up, and you regret not being an example to those around you of what it looks like to chase what you want.

I believe that our best moments are in the suffering of change and the beauty of it. Those moments show us who we are, who we might become, and if we look closely – our brilliance. My lessons in rebirth will never end. I will never stop visualizing that theme in my images, because I will never stop exploring what makes me alive. My greatest hope is that you explore your ability to change, too. We won’t always do so to great success, but doing so at all is quite the point.

Creatively, I watch my own back. I create what I want to create, when I want to create it. And I don’t mean for that to sound selfish, but simply factual and smart. I say “smart” not because I think I’m some genius, but because the only reaction to our art that we can rely on is our own. If no one were watching, it would be all that matters. And so I create under that pretense – that I must love my art first, and then hope that it is embraced by others in some way.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Time to do something new.”

And so I set out in my imagination to conjure something up I had never thought of before. A technique, an idea, a location…anything.

My mind wandered to an image that I had half-heartedly pressed before, but not truly delved into. I wanted to make it look like I was coming out of a thick fog, or another dimension. Something between the two, as I would later tell my husband. He and I talked it through – how it could be created – and then I continued working on the why.

If you know me, you know I am a stickler for the why. I don’t care how neat a technique is to try if I don’t know why I’m creating. The why came simply: I wanted to create a wall between worlds, to literally step through from one side to the other. I also liked the idea of being sucked back into the world I was trying to emerge from. All of this intention informed how I would pose.

I photographed my body in a kiddie pool that I purchased for the shoot. I rigged my camera on my balcony so that I could shoot with some distance. I sunk black fabric in the pool so that the background would be dark, and then I poured soy milk in the pool for a murky effect. It didn’t take much soy milk, and soon the pool was murky and dark at the same time.

I knew I would be photographing a forest as the eventual backdrop, which is already very dark, so I thought that the murky background of darkness from the pool would transfer well to the forest.

It was important that I photograph myself in water to create believable water lines on my body. It is one thing to blur and obscure fabric and skin behind a wall of fog, but quite another to recreate water lines (or in this case, “other dimension/fog” lines) on skin especially. So I photographed myself in the pool and then made sure to photograph the forest from the same angle. The two images blended nicely, and I sampled the murky color to paint over the forest as well.

With different blending techniques and some cutting my body started to blend into the forest. After some shading, it seemed complete. I wanted the color palette to be simple and striking, so I chose to stick with red and blue as the main colors in the image. Texture only in the background helped to give the fog some grit that I felt made it more believable, and then I was finished.

All in all, this image took me…

3 hours of planning
2 hours of setup
1 hour of shooting
12 hours of editing

…And I had a blast! I hope that you enjoy the finished product, and that, if nothing else, you are inspired to try something new and see where it leads you!

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