These are part of a series of self-portraits taken between 2017 and 2023, a personal series titled Strange Consciousness. Though I’ve never been formaly diagnosed, I experience many of the symptoms associated with Narcolepsia, including periods of excessive daytime sleepiness, insomnia, and frequent episodes of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. My strange relationship with sleep and dreaming is constantly reshaping my concept of reality, oftentimes affecting me in ways that has me dissociate from the present, from linear time and space, my own body and self.

It’s a strange consciousness. Like water, I become a shapeshifter, transitioning from cloud to raindrops, from river to the ocean, ice to vapour, blood to sweat. But I’m particularly fascinated by the ‘in betweens’ — the pause, the moment of non-being, the abstraction, the shapelessness experienced in liminality. I like to linger, lucidly, in transitional states, to see through the veil, steal from oblivion the moments collected in the voids of our awareness. These self portraits are an attempt to capture and express something of these elusive experiences, and what is lost and found through it.