MUSE

My artistic practice consisted of drawings almost exclusively until in 2012 I started photographing a young Frenchwoman. The exceptional serenity of her person expressed in her classic features enabled me to attempt to make a photographic equivalent of my oeuvre in drawings. As the trust between the model and the artist grew, we embarked on an exciting photographic journey together: the props evolving from bean pods and corals to bugs and birds to a variety of live reptiles, and she evolving from model to muse. Under all circumstances she retained her tranquil interiority, which is at the heart of the suite of photographs I made of her. In each image this is contrasted with an unsettling element, an uncanny juxtaposition, carefully and consciously balanced to neither tip into the horrific nor into the cliché beautiful. The animals and other additions act as interlopers in the portrait; often seeming to merge with the facial features. For a moment the boundaries of the body, as a container of the self, are transcended. The magic of photography for me lies in being able to extract a lasting image from an ephemeral and near to impossible situation I've painstakingly set up in my studio. Or in the case of the unchoreographable behavior of animals I've set all the parameters and then let chance happen, lying in wait for that extraordinary position of the scorpion on the face or the claw of the barn owl slipping from the models chin. My images operate on the intersection of illusion and reality.