Altar

This self-portrait was created on Georges Island in Boston Harbor, during my first visit there. My partner, Jon, brought me to the island, and we spent the day wandering through Fort Warren. Through corridors, stairwells and rooms that felt suspended somewhere between history and abandonment. I am always drawn to places like this: spaces where time has visibly passed, where walls are scarred and peeling, and where the absence of people somehow becomes a presence of its own. In this room, surrounded by layers of blue paint slowly separating from the walls, I placed myself on the small platform in the center. The astronaut is folded inward. There is no heroic stance here. No exploration. No triumph. The figure looks almost as if they are praying, grieving, surrendering, or simply trying to make themselves small enough to survive whatever is happening inside them. One of the reasons I continue returning to the astronaut is that the suit creates a strange contradiction. It is designed to protect a human being from an environment in which they could not otherwise survive. It looks strong, technological and impenetrable. But there is still a person inside it. That has always been the part that interests me. Protection does not eliminate vulnerability. Sometimes we carry our own atmosphere around us. Sometimes we build armor because we have to. And sometimes, even inside all of that protection, there are moments when all we can do is kneel. This photograph is also tied to the memory of that day itself—being shown a place I had never experienced before, exploring it with someone I loved, and finding this quiet room inside a massive historic fort. The photograph became a way of preserving both things at once: the place as it existed in that moment, and the version of myself who stood inside it. A small human being inside a suit built for survival, kneeling in the remains of another kind of fortress.