Capstone

Surrendering to Darkness, Finding the Light

My work is rooted in duality—the tension and harmony between light and shadow, stillness and movement, presence and memory. Through abstract photography using long exposures and intentional camera movement, I create images that transcend the boundaries of form and clarity. These gestures of light become emotional roadmaps—records of what I feel more than what I see. Each piece reflects a deeper personal excavation: a visual language for the residue of past trauma and its quiet, ongoing imprint on my nervous system. For years, I moved through the world with a kind of invisible armor—hyper-aware, vigilant, restrained, shaped by pressures unseen. This internal rigidity, once a necessary adaptation, eventually became an obstacle to presence, connection, and self-trust. In both life and in art, healing began when I stopped trying to control what could not be controlled. The camera became a tool not of documentation but of surrender—an extension of breath, a way to move with, rather than against, the unresolved. In letting the image blur, distort, or dissolve, I make space for softness to return to my body. The photographs live in a liminal space—between clarity and obscurity, between grief and wonder. They explore how healing unfolds not as a sudden transformation but as a quiet, nonlinear unraveling. In the layered light and shadow, I slowly recognize that beauty and pain are not opposites but companions. That I cannot rush the return to myself. That stillness can only come after movement, and movement is born only from stillness. I’m drawn to the quiet tension of light and shadow—their way of holding both presence and absence. In those layered moments, the invisible begins to surface: echoes of my memory, slowly rising, remembering and releasing through stillness and space. These images are not answers but invitations—to feel without needing to define, to witness without needing to resolve. They are fragments of time made visible. They are what remains when I stop resisting the shadows I carry and lean into the light.