Artist's Statement
We are all a compilation of moments. I am not a singer. I am not a [good] painter. I am not a musician. I am not a filmmaker. As the philosopher Shusterman would say, “to know who you are is to know who you are not,” the latter is easier to distinguish.
One thing I know is that I am a reader. I wasn’t a social child and I often found myself spending time alone. My true friends existed between the pages of books. I would escape to fantastic worlds from the comfort of my bedroom. My love for literature began before I could remember and still burns bright. As one of my favourite authors said, “one must always be careful of books and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
Books contain thousands of words and each one of them could mean something different for thousands of readers. For as long as I can remember, I have highlighted the words that speak to me the most. Whenever I collect a quote, I’ll reflect on it for years. A single quote could mean one thing for me at the time I have read it but then mean something different years later, when I am a different person. The words themselves may allude to one thing and mean something entirely different for me. That’s the beauty of literature. That’s why literature is an art from, just like a painting or a song, it can make a person feel emotions and they can even change a person. I love reading fantasy books because it is a form of escapism from a mundane life to a magical world filled with endless adventure and they tell stories of people overcoming hardships and growing into better people than they previously were; these stories inspire me.
Authors, for as long as I can remember, have been able to put my thoughts into words. They understand me more than I understand myself sometimes. Another form of art I enjoy is photography. Especially photographing people. I like to catch people in candid moments. There is such beauty in photography, it can make something mortal immortal. A moment captured by a photograph lasts forever. I love the idea that even if you stop being friends with someone or someone dies, you can look at a photograph of them and be transported to that moment in time with them, and feel how happy you felt in that moment, or sad or mad.
I’d like to compile some of these quotes and share a piece of my ‘soul’, so to speak. These quotes have shaped and re-shaped me. They are me; they are my identity. To help convey what these words mean to me, I will assign my photography to these quotes. Through my two art mediums, literature and photography, I will illustrate my identity. My project will be a photo essay guided through literature.
