EMBRACE
Artist Statement
Some things we only learn to hold after we have already let them go.
Embrace is a photography series inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s Oscar-winning short film Le Ballon Rouge (1956), a quiet meditation on companionship, freedom, and loss. Like the film, this work follows something small and fleeting, and asks what it means to truly be present with it.
The series traces a personal journey from avoidance to acceptance. For a long time, difficult emotions felt like something to outrun, to manage, to keep at arm’s length. This work is a record of learning to stop. To turn around. To let what is there simply be there.
Each image is an invitation to sit with whatever arrives, joy, grief, fear, tenderness, without reaching for the exit. Not because it is easy, but because the alternative is a life spent bracing against itself.
The title Embrace is both gesture and practice. It asks us to hold our experiences the way we would hold something we are afraid of losing, fully, and before it is too late.