Curatorial Statement: Breath Between Branches
There is no arrival in Breath Between Branches, no climax or point of declaration—only a slow unfurling. The woman we see, present across the entire series, moves not through space but through states of being. Her bare skin is not spectacle, nor confrontation, but a continuation of the air, the light, the leaves around her. She is not on display. She is within something.
Photographed in monochrome, her form dissolves gently into the natural world—not to vanish, but to belong. Shadows fall across her chest like leaves drifting onto water. The textures of her skin, the soft creases of the body, the curve of a breast in repose: these are not framed to be seen, but to be felt. Her nudity is not offered. It simply is.
There is a quality of listening that permeates the sequence—not auditory, but sensory. Her gaze turns inward, downward, or nowhere at all. She does not look to be looked at. Her hands move over her hair, her shoulders, her side, as if remembering her own edges. Even in moments of exposure, there is no demand—only presence. This presence resists definition. It is not empowered in any declarative sense; it does not seek permission, nor does it refuse it. It just continues.
The body here is not the end of meaning but the beginning of it. Female embodiment is rendered not in signs or metaphors but in breath, weight, posture. In the stillness between frames, one senses a kind of attunement: to gravity, to quiet, to the wind through branches. The natural world does not merely encircle her—it accepts her, folds her in.
If these photographs speak of gender, it is in the gentlest of tongues. They remind us that womanhood can inhabit spaces beyond performance—spaces of solitude, of soft power, of elemental return. This is not a body posed, but a body paused. And in that pause, the world seems to lean in, listening.
List of Photos at Saatchi Gallery with Links
