The old alchemists spent their lives trying to turn lead into gold. The wisest of them knew they were not really talking about metal. The lead was the animal in us: hunger, fear, the dumb heat of the blood. The gold was what a human being could become if he dared to pass through the fire of knowing himself. They drew gold with the sign of the sun. And they called one of the stages of that work sublimation: the moment when the heavy rises, and the base becomes noble.
She is in the middle of that work.
A living wall of leaves and violet blossom stands upright like a forest seen from inside, and she is half in it, half out. It is impossible to say whether the thicket is letting her go or slowly drawing her back. Her face is dark as the forest floor at night. But her arms are already the colour of the sun, from the shoulder to the tips of the fingers, as if the change had begun where we touch the world and was now climbing slowly towards the heart. One sunlit hand lifts a violet fan above her head like a crown. The other reaches out of the picture, towards whoever is watching.
Across her mouth drifts a cloud of magenta smoke. She says nothing. The ones who are truly changing rarely do.
We live in the middle of nature and forget its laws, and most of our troubles come from that forgetting. The way out is not to kill the animal within. It is to know it so well that it turns into sunlight.
Published as "Voodoo" in One Eyeland's Best of the Best Photographers (2018), and exhibited under that title in Milan in "Sublimation" and in Paris in "Imagination".
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
