Magali Duzant in Lensculture:
Purple morning glories creep and sprawl against a white fence, embracing a sculpture of sorts, wooden arms akimbo; a blue plastic bin flipped over. One can almost hear the crunch of the photographer’s foot against the dried grass. The photographs of Sue Palmer Stone exist somewhere between the extremes of exuberance and decay, fragility and strength, loss and playfulness.
It has often been said that photography is a way of making sense of the world. Breaking down the dramas of life into manageable slices, pausing the fast pace of all that is moving around us, reordering a narrative to study it. But what about the overlooked? The quiet detritus that most of us pass right by? In Embodiment : Salvaging a Self, Stone creates conversations out of the discarded objects that litter the corners of our vision.
<p “=””>In a world in which everything is disposable, what does it mean to make something out of what others might term nothing? Stone has called the project a “salvage operation”. She began focusing on the work over three years ago, in part as a response to a mysterious autoimmune disorder that she had been diagnosed with. Early iterations of the project included more figurative self portraits but as time went on, the focus shifted. The sculptural forms she was both finding and creating took the lead. Within these forms, the viewer can find an abstraction of a self; something more open, more universal. Stone’s photographs ask us to put aside a modern day desire for constant stimulation in place of a quieter gaze, a more inquisitive eye attuned to small elements.
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