Consider Preserved.

Love is
A door slammed
A window wide open
The squeal of melting rubber
The deep crunch of impact
Metal on metal
Flesh on flesh
The first glimpse
Of sunrise
Silhouette on cold street corner
An earthquake
Cold sweat in the night
A welling in your throat
A gold ring
An itch under your skin
Sipping your brilliantine
A weeping wound
The warmth of home
The ache of nostalgia
The cracking of thunder
Wet grass and fallen leaves
The gasp before the scream
Delicate filigree
A streetlamp turned off
An amputation
Forgetfulness
Emptiness
Loneliness
And surrender.

Love throws us into ‘the unknown’, it embodies all of our hopefulness and depletes the emptiness we daily ignore.
Perfumed by loneliness we embark upon a quest, seeking love in order to render ourselves ‘whole’ and potentially shatter ourselves into splintered pieces of our former identities.
We reconstruct ourselves, through melancholy and darkness to profess to the world around us never again with fervor like no other.
Yet, again we rise. For “in love we become strong, all-conquering and victorious, yet in love we are defenseless, unguarded and exposed.”
We supersede isolation and the “unbearable separateness” of human kind, thereby “offering ourselves up for sacrifice”.
Our identities become disfigured and now our desire is only for the acquisition of a balance between autonomy and dependence, which is “perhaps the most difficult challenge we face in life”, “Love is as close as we can get to the sublime in our everyday lives”, it is our definition of beauty; it blossoms as a flower and rots as a fruit. It is organic and therefore, inherently within us.
For it is in love that we are found and in love that we become lost.
*All quotes from‘A Labour of Love’ article written by Nan Goldin, featured in Acne Paper no.7, pp. 106-107.

The above images are from an installation from earlier in the year, the piece was a form of expression in order to convey a segregation of my being- an emotional amputation of sorts. Through the use of a site-specific space, materials often used to preserve food, a hand bound intimate-scale book and poem, and a whole heap of smashed gin bottles, (in order to comment upon the substance abuse nature of courting within Australia) I hoped to divulge my experiences with love, and the acknowledgment of the need to preserve the most significant memories, ones which we often disregard and later find to be instrumental in the construction of our selves.