My Metaphors...

Cancer effects everyone.  I don’t know anyone who has not been effected by this disease.  As wrong and painful as this journey is, at whatever level you are effected by it, we find a way to cope.  We deal.  We adjust.  To cope means to deal, with some measure of success, with the difficulties you are forced to face.  Every one of us has a will, a strength, lying within us that is sometimes forced to surface. 

Susan Sontag in her work Illness as Metaphor said this:

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.  Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.  Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at lease for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

My coping mechanism, for this trip to the other kingdom, has been my photography and writing.  I have been working on a series of images about cancer.  It is in process, but thought I’d share.  The fabric in these images represents cancer. 

Cancer is not a disease that follows a concrete, linear or clearly defined path.  Just as we are each unique and complicated, cancer is a beast with a different energy depending on the person who is fighting it.  The motion of fabric and the ways you can move and manipulate represent cancer for me.  The gestures and facial expressions in relation to the manipulation of the fabric reflect the experience.  Sophia has been an essential part of Madelyn’s journey and I thought it important that she be a part of the photoshoots.


(The first four are somewhat finished pieces.  Each image is covered in encaustic medium...)

(I haven't yet added the the encaustic to these images yet ...)

And lastly on a more documentary note... check out my beautiful girl!