SHARED SOLITUDE
The blue of cyanotypes invites us to pause before the sea, to breathe the salty life and love that we are, and to find a moment of contemplation, of exploring and embracing solitude. This solitude is a timeless refuge, a state of awareness that allows us to feel connected to our own essential being, and to the nature of which we are a part; it is a chair that welcomes us and that we share with ourselves, with Mother Earth, with beings — human and non-human — who cross our path or accompany us
It is the chair, the boat, the corner of sand, water and rock, our own body, everything that sustains us and invites us to create a space for reflection in which to return our attention and intention to the natural world that we are and from which we come, to place it in balance with the human world we have created, and thus become whole and create bonds and ways of life that are freer, kinder.
Shared solitude is a meditative state; it is an inquiry into one’s own existence in order to inhabit shores of healing, to move through cliffs of chiaroscuro and rocks in constant erosion and evolution, to become waves of love, winds of fullness, and grains of sand and salt, of calm and freedom that cling to the skin and warm us deep within.
The darkrooms of chemical photography inspire me to embrace solitude. Emerging from the darkness and exposing the sensitivity of images to the light is a way of expressing and sharing this solitude. Cyanotype is one of the paths.
In this photographic contact process, once the image has been exposed, it is washed with water so that some of the salts that are soluble dissolve and wash away with the water, while the insoluble salts that provide the blue color remain, forming the photograph.
I like to see ourselves as the salts in this process: when we bathe in the sea we flow with the water full of other salts and other beings, and we share solitude within the water; yet at the same time we can be insoluble, emerge from the water, coexist, and create other spaces and images in this world.
