My camera and I

Self Portraits at home - August 2022

I bought Rupi Kaur’s: The Sun and Her Flowers in 2020 during the pandemic where I devoured the entire book in one sitting. I found refuge in the powerful nature of her poetry and reassurance in the innate beauty of her words during a time that felt overwhelmingly surreal and scary.

I decided to create these self portraits (my very first attempt!) as I realise that being the subject is as important as telling the story. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say about these, or how I was trying to express myself, until I picked up The Sun and Her Flowers again recently and was reminded of this Rupi Kaur poem.
I couldn’t have written better words to encapsulate the essence of my ‘self’ in this moment, more than this:

“it has been one of the greatest and most difficult years of my life. i learned everything is temporary. moments. feelings. people. flowers. i learned love is about giving. everything. and letting it hurt. i learned vulnerability is always the right choice because it is easy to be cold in a world that makes it so very difficult to remain soft. i learned all things come in twos. life and death. pain and joy. salt and sugar. me and you. it is the balance of the universe. it has been the year of hurting so bad but living so good. making friends out of strangers. making strangers out of friends. learning mint chocolate chip ice cream will fix just about everything. and for the pains it can’t there will always be my mother’s arms. we must learn to focus on warm energy. always. soak our limbs in it and become better lovers to the world. for if we can’t learn to be kind to each other how will we ever learn to be kind to the most desperate parts of ourselves.”

So beautiful, isn’t it?

―Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers