Studio Reflection - May 2025

Finding and making space to breathe, finding permission and expression through air.

An inhale, an exhale.

The air is heavy with cicada song, a low thrumming that has consumed the typical quiet of the road I live on, nestling the air close against my body. I leave the kitchen windows chronically open, letting the house self regulate its temperature during the fickle late spring. The whirring wings are with me as I make springtime comforts-scallion pancakes, bright rainbow chard salad, springtime early eggs with bright orange yolks.

In between work, meetings, facilitating, planning, and photographing, I have been relying on small rituals to stay grounded-tea with the cows in the morning, slow movement practices, sipping an espresso in the local cafe with my phone tucked out of reach. As much as this month has been busy, cultivating space, cultivating an intentional relationship to air, has buoyed me through.

In Kinship, we’ve been contemplating the ineffable for our first season in our year-long Elemental call-for-engagement. Practicing alongside others in a practice group this month, I found myself tugging at the threads of my relationship to air. I did a lot of reflecting-going into the group I thought a lot about my history of struggling to breathe from asthma as a child and chronic respiratory infections into my early 20s. I also thought about the ways that I am very conscious of air, particularly in public spaces, and often mask and consider the microorganisms we are all engaging with, and by extension, with each other.

I thought I was going to be reflecting on the sensual relationship I have with air, and I did some of that certainly, but I also found myself pulled into a more intimate conversation with myself about space. I wound up thinking deeply not only about the way that I physically show up in space, in air, but how I influence air through voice and breath, and how I am influenced by the air that moves in me and through me.

It was really healing for me to think through this in connection with others. I have tended to make myself small, quiet, for fear of being misunderstood or entering into conflict, and I have chipped away at my confidence in expressing myself authentically. Working with how I tangibly experience something as omnipresent as air, something that we all engage with, all influence, by the sounds that we make, the microorganisms we breathe into the air, the chemical exchanges happening at a molecular level, encouraged an expansion of perspective in me that I wasn’t really expecting.

Through this practice of trying to photograph the ineffable, trying to make visible something that is stubbornly invisible, the idea of agency kept resurfacing from me. I’ve struggled with loss of agency many times in my life, particularly in medical settings from a very young age, but also in interpersonal relationships and underdeveloped skills around boundary settings and emotional regulation. I can at times feel like my life is a runaway train that I am clinging desperately to, part of me yearning for some semblance of control, part of me terrified of that control.

A lot of this fear manifests in my voice. I feel anxiety as a constriction in my throat, and can sometimes feel as though I am physically struggling to force words out, even amongst trusted friends and peers. I love to sing, yet few people in my life hear me do so because of my insecurities. I often swallow my own feelings to keep the peace, or struggle with intense anxiety when I wrestle with voicing something that feels exceptionally true. Photographing my neck and playing around with different technical ideas brought this into particular focus for me.

Then I found myself one afternoon sitting on the floor of my living room with my camera dangling precariously above me, flash mounted, towels protecting the floor beneath me, screaming through a throat-full of water. I had begun the shoot with an idea to try to breathe through water, capturing the bubbles of air as they gurgled up through my throat, unsure if I could command what are automatic processes that normally prevent drowning to do so.

What emerged instead was rage, a lot of it. Sometimes my own practice surprises me, and as my cat Edgar ran off to avoid the water suddenly flying across the room, I found myself a little shocked by the images I was making (does that ever happen to you?). Photography as a cathartic release, certainly. I love these unexpected moments, the ones that call me into some deeper connection or bring something to my consciousness in a new way.

This inward investigation also bloomed outward as I considered the ways that the cycles of the world around me, the seasons certainly, but also the moon, affect me. I’ve written about and wrangled with the cyclical mental health issues I’ve been experiencing over the past year in particular, and breaking out of my usual photographic practice allowed me to approach this subject from a much different thought space.

I’m excited to work with these images more and maybe get out into the full moon midnight rain more often this summer to make more photographs that allow me to sit comfortably (or at least, more comfortably) in my own darkness. In sharing this work with the group, I felt my throat tighten to the point that it was difficult to speak, and then relax as we moved through conversation together.

This month has felt like a shift in the winds (sorry, cannot help the elemental puns lately), and I am excited about all of the photography that has been in my life lately. I am currently working on a project I’ll be sharing about more in July, and am dreaming up new local offerings. I’m excited to be playing in this newfound space that has been shaped by spending time with air.