I started investigating the artistic potential of thermal cameras, the ones used by the military to detect people crossing borders, back in 2014-15, but I wanted to do something personal with them. I wanted to use the special properties of this technology, its ability to see inside our bodies, in a way that encouraged a slow, intimate and conversational process between me and the subject.
Some years later, around 2019, I started working with a friend called Sarah, and naturally our conversations drifted towards the way to the female bodies change over time: through the medicalisation of childbirth and other invasive surgeries or through the natural processes of entropy. So I began to think a lot about how this technology designed to oppress can be subverted to creative ends, how it could be used to reveal what is beautiful, to show us what's going on behind the scars we carry. The camera looks beyond our imperfect surfaces; it picks up the warm blood flowing through Sarah's veins, but all the blemishes, scars, marks left by time disappear. Her skin is like marble.
I then made very deliberate choices about the scale, the paper, the quality of the greys, to emphasise a vulnerability, melancholia, and timelessness, while also creating a tension and presence that cannot be ignored.