Things Merging and Falling Apart is an ongoing series of unique chromogenic photograms made in the color darkroom without a camera. Objects and organic fragments are placed directly against type C paper and moved, layered or masked throughout the exposure time. Forms overlap, edges migrate, colors bleed into one another, and traces of previous arrangements remain after the objects themselves have been re-arranged. Something appears to be assembling at the same moment that something else is breaking apart.

My interest in cameraless photography came from desire to capture not a decisive moment, but a time lapse, a transformation caught on a light-sensitive surface. I started off working with recognizable shapes that after long darkroom manipulations often would turn out looking completely abstract yet more appealing to me; physically acting on paper surface, they became tangible imprints of ephemeral emotional states.  Instead of imitating the illumination and depicting formal qualities, these images challenge the expectations and capture the light itself; they bring viewers’ attention to the performative nature of creative process and elaborate on chance effects and intuitive states of being.