I began this series of symbolist images in spring of 2025 as a subconscious response to government policies of displacement and dehumanization. I photographed clay figures (my own and those of ceramic artists Jindra Viková and Dirk Staschke) to suggest subjects threatened by a loss of identity or sense of self. I layered these images into murky and tangled environments to externalize inner turmoil. The figures appear both human and vaguely alien, but all share a striking sense of psychic nakedness and vulnerability. They appear to me as neophytes or newly created beings pulled from one phase of existence into another, making their way on unfamiliar and precarious terrain.

I developed the series to allegorize suffering as a darkness of the soul  but also to gesture toward our struggle for meaning in the worst of times. The dichotomy of two mediums (clay and photography) stresses the tension between the fragility of human life and our desire for something beyond ourselves. Clay is earth and an ancient metaphor for the ephemerality of our existence — earth to earth and dust to dust. Photography is light, reflection, vision, and symbolic of revelation. Together these are the aspects of ourselves that make us human.