Obscura, 2023

Obscura is a series of ghostly black-and-white self-portraits made during a solitary stay in a historic manor and its surrounding grounds. Taking its title from the Latin word meaning "dark" or "shadowed" — and echoing the camera obscura, the origin of image-making — the work explores the porous boundary between presence and absence, memory and desire, body and myth.

The photographs depict the nude body as both subject and signal — veiled, obscured, or turned away — allowing it to flicker between vulnerability and strength, eroticism and evanescence. The face is mostly hidden or eclipsed, leaving the body as the primary vehicle of emotion and atmosphere. It is through posture, tension, and gesture that the images speak.

The erotic in Obscura is not performative but psychological, tethered to the private and haunted space of longing. The nudity is not offered to be consumed but to be witnessed — not for recognition, but as a manifestation of something internal. This is the erotic as a state of liminality, a charged threshold between self and other, between desire and dissolution.

The manor itself becomes a silent character in this unfolding — a container for ghosts, inherited narratives, and unspeakable grief. Within it and beyond it, in trees, fields, and ruins, the body appears and disappears — a spectre of its own becoming. Obscura is a meditation on erotic interiority, disembodied intimacy, and the longing to be seen without being captured. At once self-portrait and apparition, it inhabits the spaces where silence, solitude, and sensuality converge.