BIRTH DEATH PSYCHEDELICS

BIRTH DEATH PSYCHEDELICS is an experimental photographic series that draws from transcending experiences in birth, death and psychedelics. It is an ongoing project that was conceived shortly after I gave birth to my son. I felt “oceanic boundlessness”. I felt close with death and profoundly connected to nature. I had these feelings when my mother was dying in 2009 after an unsuccessful brain surgery. The photographs combine these ordinary experiences that possess indistinguishable moments of clarity, connectedness, spiritual ecstasy and transformation. BDF, reflects an exploration of the intricacies within human relations that are rooted in high and low pleasures (bodily and intellectually), and how birth, death and psychedelics are inexorably linked and revisited through memory, historically and culturally. I am interested in these ordinary experiences as they set in motion profound disorientation and/or a transformation. Through research at the Betsy Gordon Psychoactive Substance Research Collection, I investigate threads within the historical that articulate a system of transference – a methodical extension of consciousness. The photographs reference an extension of the static and dynamic feminine, via considerations of distorted realities and perceptual illusions, connecting into ecological crisis. Through photography, I draw out the potential of a larger narrative that addresses the resources of power in commonality of experience: in the archetypal transcending events that we all share. BDP, threads these events through maternal separation, attachment, and the sentiments of high and low pleasure in order to arrive upon the questions that surround what further shapes psychological and biological responses to environments, which in turn has been crucial to the reproduction of feminine arc.