Piece Description
Medium: Photography
Dimensions: 5 ft by 3 ft
Everyone knows you cannot go through life unscathed. Whether it is physical or emotional, as easily forgotten as a cut or as bitter as heartbreak, everyone at one point or another has become accustomed to pain. “Maturation” is a photographic series depicting an individual who has endured pain, decorated in dead rose petals and bathing in blue and red lights. In “Maturation,” I explore the response to a painful experience, showing not only how pain can be transformed into beauty, but also how the way we recover from pain is beautiful in itself. With this piece I hope to move people to embrace their pain, and to take a step to overcome it. I chose to represent pain through dead rose petals, as the living rose is a symbol of life, vibrancy, and love. But in “Maturation,” the subject embraces the dead rose petals as a part of himself and manages to see the beauty through the pain: for healing can only be achieved through an integration of all of our experiences, including the painful ones.
