What is left behind?! Or is it?

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A recent trip to Retro Rabbit in Pierneef street, Pretoria proved to be quite the eye catcher. Here my impressions.

This series "What is left behind?! Or is it?" was inspired by a rather sad event, the passing of my grandmother. She left behind a fully functioning household with loads of crockery and goodies and things. The overwhelming task of sorting through the items and finding a new home for them or bluntly put just throwing some of them away is exhausting. I guess this shoot helped me to see the matter in a more positive light, to find beauty rather than sadness in things that once belonged to someone else. 

The idea is that some things are never left behind, they might only change hands or minds.

 

Waking up in the Mind Palace

Recently I started experimenting more and more with image reflections and photo manipulation as you can see here. I found it to be necessary to explain myself with regard to these images in a little more detail as they seem to slightly resemble kaleidoscopic imagery and odd combinations of visuals, but they in fact are built on a system of meaning which I will explain here. 

We all find ourselves in situations where we look inward and feel a little or very confused about ourselves, our actions and the outside world. Being aware of these thoughts and actively trying to understand and analyse them in order to better one's 'beingness' sometimes seems like an incredibly overwhelming and difficult task. This effort of realising what these thoughts are and the serious inner stroll amongst the pillars of ideas and the big open mind palace with high ceilings and intricate paintings and pattern on the walls, is what I am trying to capture in this new series of images. Instead of looking at results and answers I am trying to capture the middle or in between stages of actions that develop from thoughts. 

I hope that this makes things a little clearer, even though it deals with confusion.

Knosing

The need to be creative is a wonderful one, but if you feel uninspired it is terrible. Sinful in fact if that is what you strive for. You start questioning things around you. An experiment one can do which fascinates me is the following: Close your one eye and look at your nose. It is in your sight from the top till the bottom but you can't see it in its full form or shape. Does that mean that your nose is only half a nose? Yes sure look at it with both your eye, squint, and you will realise that it is blurred and exists even less as a shape as it is not as defined. The point I'm trying to make is that your face grows out of your head, out of your mind, so if you interact with someone face to face does that mean there is only one face in the conversation or two? You are only able to see the one you are looking at, not your own. Also, within that interaction, don't you feel you are in the space between you and the person? You are throwing words at the other persons face which only start existing within the space between you and her/ him and then the other person takes them in.. or not. Your mind seems to thus not exist in your head but in the space just in front of you, hovering there, ready to interact and explore. Tough it carries a wall either to the left or the right (depending which eye you close) of your vision. Therefore we know that our nose can be observed from either side and that it is big, forming a little arrow pointing us in a direction. Let's call it the nosal compass of our mind. As someone pointed out, people are counted or seen as noses, for example 'there are ten noses in the room' or as one would say in the German language 'zwei Euro pro Nase' which translates to 'two Euro per nose(person)'. Does this mean that the reason we count or see noses is the fact that it is the closest thing to our mind (physically) that we ourselves can observe and thus we being there becomes real? 

Being led by our noses, exploring the world around us being aware of the nose in the corner of our eye creates a very different experience of our reality as it makes us perceive it out of a third party perspective. How wonderful! This allows us to observe the observed behind the shield of our physical being which is protecting our mind, for now. 

The conclusion here, what does facing yourself mean?!