Phantom Pain is a navigation. An exploration to find the past’s elusive, and sometimes avoided, truths. The pain never processed. The losses never reconciled. The embrace never returned. 

The moon has a funny way of giving me comfort and guidance, and she has guided this work with her revealing light. Moonlight is used in this project to manifest the past’s ghosts and memories, and to meld my subjects with shadow and Earth, texture and feeling. 

This project is dedicated to the commonalities we all share. Our bodies and how we mitigate the emotional distance we put between ourselves, and our natural environments and how we interact and exist within them. Not all viewers will see the same thing in this work as each of our existences and realities are different and unique. Viewers may see trauma, love, longing, or even a memory of their childhood sleep-paralysis demon in these images as they are invited to bring their own meanings to the images. However, this project is meant to enable and invite confrontation with these seemingly disparate truths, whether the images yield representations of one’s own life and experiences, or uncover an intangible feeling previously lingering on their periphery, now fully realized.