Winter walk to the Sundance Nordic Center meadow with Gygi.
Film notes: Very foggy, snowy day- first snow. Shot Portrait 800 rated at 200 pushed a stop on the Rollei.
Modern dancers and choreographer team Haleigh Larmer & Megan O’Brien at Little Sahara State Park, Utah
Read MoreI offer Seen as a new portrayal. A somatic-focused way of showing up and showing, a body-lead, feels>looks witnessing experience resulting in photographs as reflections, as oracles, and symbols of what is and will never be again.
Read More“I loved the freedom of letting inspiration strike—of choosing the thing that felt right and not that was pre-determined. I loved the deep safety I felt while being completely exposed.
I am stunned and thrilled and think they are some of the most true images I’ve ever seen of myself.”
Read MoreA hours long experience modeling begins with excited nerves and a lump of shapeless clay that becomes a figure in likeness that tells nothing of the nerves, sore boredom, and fascination with process while the experience itself foreshadows what will last (legacy and metal) and who won’t (flesh, thoughts, bone).
Read MoreWhether it’s a desire to collaborate with another artist or a very real world need for high value images for your website, social media, and newsletters my artist portrait session experience witnesses you in your work.
Read MoreThe first time Didi made portraits of me in Sedona for the Memory Cult gathering last year she hummed a song- over and over and over…
Read MoreThis is sapphic love with Aubrey and Chloe…
Read MoreThis is New Portrayal
A body of work co-created with deconstruction worker women being ourselves, together. We’re curating new experiences with being seen, seeing, and offering a new take on the significance of image and the experience of portrayal.
Read More“You are absolutely a master of light. I love your eye and the moments you told me to pause…You are a true artist.”- Katie
It can’t only be me
stomach distended with cramps after kids or eating something I shouldn’t like a bread or a bit too much
it can’t only me be that sleeps on her arms
it can’t only be me in disbelief and denial
at the blood.
It can’t only be me who trips on her own life or her own traps or her own fears.
Maybe I’m not sick of it so much as I’m just sick of how I’m thinking about it or maybe I’m bleeding soon and forgot. Or maybe I’m forgetting soon and bleeding.
Have you ever dumped a cup of red clotty menstrual blood into water and seen the red mystery of it and felt some feeling with no name?
It can’t just be me who feels into the life awe burdensome beast of being in a body that has breasts and a dark womb that I can’t see that makes small lives and disposable organs and then acts normal as if it’s all “tale as old as time” but then again
Have we lived or does living invoke death and all this is actually tiny daily yin yangs any old way you slice it?
It can’t be me alone who forgets and forgets to feel and floats face down in the hens coming home to roost, the tension of opposites embodied in the moment after moment after moment of all of this.
Maybe getting out of prison and laying on the ground
maybe just being out of prison is enough and you don’t have to make something of your freedom.
Maybe do nothing or maybe that’s a cop out, energy on my life wasted because I didn’t become anything but everything.
Maybe to have a heartbeat is enough.
Maybe I don’t know how to improvise and integrate all of this but maybe it’s not only me.
The bend of arm has never been like this, nor her face. Not your hands holding infinity in the palm, not these language letters making some kind of connected sense in their own kind of never before. Never particular burdens and wishes and desires held in brain or coming from elsewhere. Not you, not me, not us, not them, not any of it ever again, or since.
Tent Talks- Part One
Tent Talks- Part Two
Thoughts on exile and the things we outgrew by Alex Caldiero. Clipped edit from, “The Sonosopher” by Torben Bernhard and Travis Low. Watch it on YouTube if it resonates.
A poets answer to “Do you miss the fellowship of Mormonism?” Any past things outgrown or excommunicated from by choice or force can take the place of the specifics here and the pain of your loss is justified.
I dreamed it
sunlight bright
as lady hawk plucked
the wet winged hatchling
from mother-made nest.
I drank it
red hot and jaw clenching
in its timeless loop
of awful devouring
while there I too,
devoured.
I lay
as they cut the bulbous middle
(intestines set aside)
pulling soft screaming life from me
(hardening breasts by the minute)
to make a meal of me.
I bleed
a bucket tick tock, a clock
to cry myself dry
a crimson ridding
an inside, made out.
I tear
the skin flesh
of apple
of trout
and steal the calf’s milk for my cheese.
“Thrust”
Lidia Miles drowned the pages in a tidal wave of body, art, animal, element, futurepast, sex, friendship, and time, my my my my, my. 🌊
Death is the beginning, the cost, and the portal of rebirth 💀 📷 @themythopoetic
I’m v into flash at night in the garden right now. I’d like to invite everyone out in the garden to see- that’s part of my nature. I like to hold microphones up to the thrills and pains in life.
I am so lucky! I know and meet the most interesting people, I feel loved by them, I feel safe to share.
What a thing to feel!
What fortune!
In these most recent years I’ve become a kind of a devotee to “how it feels”, more than “how it looks” or “what I should do”. When I engage should and look, I find it useful to notice which aspects of me are in the drivers seat and where it takes me.
Some of my experience in this process has been unorthodox and strange and I’ve been very worried at times I would hurt people by not being what I thought I was, or what I wanted you to think I was. It’s embarrassing to be a person! So cringy to change! Heavy is the head that crowns itself in hyper-vigilance.
When I look through a technical (stay safe) or pathological (you’re not good enough, yet) lens I am not aware of this other “feel” thing. Feel is a different vibe, so now I am practicing feeling, which is goodhard.
A few weeks ago I was processing a core memory of being hit as a child and you know what I remember most? I most remember feeling in absolute awe that after the first punch you don’t feel it anymore.
What skill!
What a perfect mechanism!
And I was right. On one side of the coin our nervous system does something protective and evolved, but this dissociative state of not-feeling as a way of life got real deep on lack and deep on numb as it worked its programming for the last 40 years.
Learning to paint has taught me that I’ve done technique (stay safe) long enough to be burned out so now I am raising the energy of expression (I am safe, I feel safe). Sometimes “feel” is good looking and smooth but often it ain’t. But then again what the fuck is “good”?
The things about us, the ways we are and were brave in what @lidiamiles calls, “the face of fuck” may be called wounds, but wounds can also be voids, voids can be filled with whatever we put there to be amplified and materialized as our lens and life.