Hemispheres: A Temporary Record of How the Light Got In  is a series of photographs that begins to document the artist’s experiences with a recently discovered brain condition that has left her vision sprinkled with bright dots of light and, for a while, rendered her thoughts disarranged and her hands unable to hold a camera.

Her curiosity and fears about the pharmaceutical treatments being used in her body became an inspiration when she combined the chemicals with film and exposed it to light. Using various photographic techniques, mainly camera-less, including Mordençage, lumen printing, photogram, luminogram, pinhole photography, and chemigram, she explored her nascent desire to deal with light and the myriad ways it moves through us.

The result is a new photographic object that illustrates how light travels through various openings and reaches us in ways we never would have anticipated--evoking celestial bodies, earthly rhizomes, even cerebral hemispheres and, indeed, bright dots of light. The connections between celestial and natural occurrences, which seem to populate the artist’s new vision, worked their way into the images! This unpredictable and unexpected result of the process of creating these images not only preserves the personal magic of the photographic medium for the artist, but mimics her passage through the unknown and the inevitably ephemeral nature of each of our lives.

The work is dark at times, and densely layered, visually and conceptually. The images are entwined with thoughts of mortality, discovery, humility, loss, resilience and renewal, and of the subconscious as it makes its way to the forefront.

In their book, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari posit that thought is a rhizome. A rhizome is remarkable in that if it is broken at any point, then that segment can generate a new rhizome. It is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, and susceptible to constant modification.” The work in this series suggests the scale of nature and how we are all interconnected in that scale: that something so enormous to one human can be so insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe.

What began as an exploration of the human brain, and the limitations the artist might now face, quickly became the space she needed to reflect upon elements of her very being to which she had been less attuned.