This surrealist series of images emerged in spring of 2025 as my response to the uncertainties and abuses of our current political reality. I photographed clay figures (my own and those of ceramic artists Jindra Viková and Dirk Staschke) to suggest subjects stripped of individuality. I layered these images into murky and tangled environments to externalize the inner turmoil experienced with a loss of security, identity, or selfhood. The figures appear both human and vaguely alien, but all share a sense of psychic nakedness and vulnerability. They appear to me as neophytes — strangers in a strange land — making their difficult way across the precarious landscape of the unconscious. With both hope and fear they search for something lost, hidden, or unknown within or beyond themselves, as in a dream or myth.

I developed this series to allegorize the anxieties we share when basic human values are threatened or damaged. The dichotomy of two mediums (clay and photography) stresses the tension between the fragility of human life and our desire for deeper meaning. Clay is earth and an ancient metaphor for the ephemerality of our existence — earth to earth and dust to dust. Photography is light, reflection, revelation, and symbolic of visionary insight.