2022 SIDEDOOR PARTICIPANTS
Allison Zulawski
What started as a photography project has become a mixed media project (photos+writing). The stories that accompany the photos have been as important as the photos themselves.
I set out to retell salient childhood memories through the use of color and obscured forms.
Images by: Allison Busch Zulawski
This process has been one of continual excavation and exploration. I'm finding the feelings under the surface of memory and then finding deeper emotions under those feelings. It's given me a taste of soulful creation that I hadn't known before.
This process has given me practice in attuning to inspiration. I feel like I now have better discernment regarding when to follow ideas and when to let them go. Beyond that, I know identify as an artist. Before this process, I wouldn't have called myself that but now it feels easy and true.
Natalie Gildersleeve
My project is evolving and shifting but it is looking at the different types of soul connections and soul friendships we can experience when we open into a place of vulnerability with each other.… not just lovers but all connections that take us deeper into our true selves and the experience of being seen. And, ultimately connecting with the greater intimacy of life itself.
Images by: Natalie Gildersleeve
In everyone's life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: "You are like nobody since I love you." This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it an decipher identity and destiny.
John O'Donohue
Zoe Wittering
I am portrait photographer intrigued by the individual and the way that we connect with our environment and with those around us. I am particularly interested in periods of transition and how we, as individuals, deal with the fears and uncertainties that inevitably accompany change.
Images by: Zoe Wittering
The late teens has always been a period that fascinates me. It is a time that encompasses enormous change as young people move on from school to work or further education and often also leave the family home. I believe that this time is hugely formative in terms of our adult lives. As my own children reach that age I realise more and more that it is rarely depicted honestly in mainstream media. It is an age that is generally stereotyped as brittle or difficult or, these days, associated with social media profiles that are, often, far removed from the real lives of teenagers.
Last Summer is a study of teenage boys and girls between the age of 15 and 18. The portraits are taken in places that the teenagers associate with their childhood whilst they themselves are on the cusp of establishing themselves as adults. I use digital and film cameras.
When photographing I’m interested in the beauty and strength that comes with the vulnerability and intimacy of being photographed as an individual in their chosen environment.
Summer Lyn
My theme is to raise awareness around the struggles of motherhood and perfection. How mother’s battle through whatever life throws at them. As the project morphed, the central theme became a deep love for their children, making it through the storms of life, and the shore line was always the love for their children. Whether they fell or not, getting back up or keeping from the actual fall was loving their children so deeply and in such a profound way that it didn't matter if they didn’t do life perfectly, but hat they were just showing up.
I've learned as a mother I was never the only one to hold on for dear life, how this movement and these images I am creating tell such a unique yet similar story to women everywhere. My process has changed dramatically, as I have never as an artist was able to sit with myself and create. But it took my own storm and my own navigation to find my deepest voice, and it’s one that needs to be heard, through my images and my written work.
Images by: Summer Lyn
Having battled trials as a mother, I knew there was a voice deep inside me that had to be told.
As a mother who fell, and brushed off her knees, I know at the end of it something was going to be told, and with Yan announcing the first annual SIDEDOOR project, I knew it was the time not only to invest in myself, but to share with Yan my story, my life, the deepest parts of me, and surrender myself to not only someone that knows art, but someone that I knew could dig my roots up. That's what can has done for me this year so far.
Image by: Lynn Walker
SIDEDOOR has given me time to think, develop, and create a personal project that varies from my client work.
"I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
