artist statement

Retrovision.

This body of work is a poetic exploration of love as a transformative force—one that destabilizes, reveals, and ultimately reconstructs the self. It considers what it means to be both the artist and the muse. Rather than treating love as a fixed or purely romantic experience, these poems trace its evolution as a psychological and spiritual process: from projection and longing, through rupture and disillusionment, toward clarity, embodiment, and integration.

The poems began before the connection it seems to describe ever existed. Most of the pieces were written prior to meeting the person who would later reflect the voice I had already constructed. Because of this, the series operates in a space between premonition and projection, questioning whether emotional experiences are discovered, created and somehow anticipated.

The series follows a nonlinear emotional arc, moving between intimacy, distance, illusion and perception, self-abandonment and self-reclamation. At its core is a speaker who encounters love first as something external—idealized, almost mythic—before gradually recognizing it as a mirror that exposes internal desires and fears. This shift from external fixation to internal awareness is central to the work’s progression. 

The poems are written through a layered perspective that moves between voices: an externalized “other,” the self, and the reader. This triangulated voice allows the speaker to observe themselves at a distance, constructing a dynamic in which love becomes both an encounter and a reflection. In this way, the work destabilizes the boundary between subject and object, suggesting that what is perceived as “other” may in fact be an extension, projection, or recognition of the self.

Written in advance of full understanding, the poems function almost as a premonition of lived experience. This concept is reflected in the title Retrovision (thank you Ayanna), which speaks to the paradox of recognizing a pattern before fully inhabiting it. The work holds a central tension between awareness and embodiment—the sense of knowing before knowing—and the choice to move through that knowledge regardless.

Recurring motifs such as light and haze, dream-state and reality, the physical body as a site of tension and release—function as markers of the speaker’s changing consciousness. Language itself becomes both a bridge and a barrier: an attempt to articulate feeling, while also revealing the limits of communication in moments of emotional intensity. The poems mirror the instability of perception when one is deeply entangled in love and self-discovery.

Structurally, the collection is organized as a sequence rather than a set of standalone pieces. Each poem builds upon the last, contributing to a cumulative narrative of transformation. The final pieces do not resolve love into certainty, but instead reframe it as something grounded, sacred, reciprocal, and expansive—no longer an illusion to chase, but a presence to recognize and embody.

Ultimately, this project asks: What does it mean to encounter love not as an escape from the self, but as a force that demands one’s full presence within it? Through this lens, love becomes not an endpoint, but a process—one that requires vulnerability, passion, accountability, and the willingness to be changed.