Essay by Zosia Slifirski Duckett for Contextualising Practice 

Prologue

Two years ago, on a cold wet afternoon in early September, in a moment of strange clarity after a shower, I took a photograph of my reflection in the foggy bathroom mirror. I was away, in my favourite landscape in the world—the wild, wind-bitten coastline of the Gunaikurnai and the Bunurong people, where sky and sea blur into one. I’d just returned from a long walk along the beach. My body tired, ears ringing, salt lingering on my skin, the rhythm of the waves echoing deep in my bones. Stepping into the steaming shower, I carried a heaviness I couldn’t name. And afterwards, standing in that dim bathroom, surrounded by steam, silence, I caught sight of myself—half-formed, shimmering, spectral—in the foggy mirror. I was arrested. Something stirred. A silent knowing passed through me. I took a photo.

That photograph—which I later titled My Heart Breaks Like Surf—was the first in what has become a series of intuitive self-portraits. There had been no intention to start a body of work, to make an artwork at all. The moment simply called to be held. My artistic process is led by sensation, emotion, and the body’s quiet urgings, allowing the concept, and meaning to emerge in time. The act of photographing arises from these moments of bodily awareness—when emotion signals that a photograph should be taken, a moment captured. The camera is not a tool of observation, but a companion in attunement. These images are born from moments when sensation wells up and becomes physical—when something moves through me that demands response. The photographs arise from an instinctive, affective state—a way of being in relation with self, with space, with feeling. As such, these images function as both reflections and registrations of the self in flux, as lived experience rather than static representation.

Essay

This essay explores how my practice, specifically within this  , is shaped by the aesthetics of disorientation and the poetics of bodily perception. My work operates within a threshold: between presence and representation, between sensation and image, between dwelling and expression. Drawing from theories of embodiment, phenomenology, and the sublime, I trace the ways in which photography becomes not an act of depiction, but a form of devotion, a dwelling in awe—an encounter with the ineffable.

Townsend’s (2019) notion of the pre-sense is foundational to my practice – a pre-conscious awareness that something must be made, before its form is known.  It is not about the idea preceding the image; it is the body preceding both. A flutter in the gut, a heaviness in the chest, a release of breath, a bodily nudge, a sensation that says now. These are the cues that guide my hand to the camera. The photograph is not taken of something, but with something—some interior motion or residue that insists on becoming visible. The camera does not document an idea; it responds to the body’s subtle call to presence. In Art as Experience, Dewey (1934) writes that the artist does not merely execute a plan, but rather ‘lives through’ the conditions of creation. For me, those conditions are not externally orchestrated. They arise in quiet moments—guided by feeling, listening and knowing.

This way of working resonates with what Anderwald, Grond and Gálvez Pérez (2021), call getting dizzy—an embodied engagement with disorientation as a generative space for knowing. Disorientation—emotional, physical, perceptual—can disturb the clarity of the world but also open space for embodied knowledge. In the fog of the mirror, outlines falter and vision slips. But in that blur, clarity emerges. The photograph does not resolve disorientation; it dwells within it, becoming a trace of a moment that was never fully visible but deeply known.

The core of this practice is that which moves through the body before it is named. Affect, in the words of theorist Massumi (2002), is intensity that cannot be fully translated into emotion or language. It is relational, pre-cognitive, and fundamentally embodied. In my images, affect precedes action. The photograph is not constructed through planning but received through bodily openness—an act of listening, of being attuned to what is already in motion within and around me. Affect is carried; it arrives through atmosphere, light, texture, and fragmentation. It arrives in the body’s presence, and also in its partial absence.

This practice of attunement parallels theological ideas of embodied creativity as discussed by Bray (2024). Bray writes that the artist, like the believer, inhabits their body not merely as an individual, but as part of a larger, spiritual body. Within this frame, artistic labour becomes a form of service. To create is to open oneself to reception, not to assert mastery. The artist becomes the vessel not the maker. I do not control the image. I prepare for it. I wait for it. I dwell in the space where it might arrive. The act of photographing becomes a gesture of reverence, not of capturing. The image is not mine. It moves through me. It asks to be witnessed, not owned. My role is to hold the conditions—the stillness, the sensation, the fog—and to allow the image to move through me. The act of photographing becomes devotional. It is not forced. It is waited for. The image is a trace—of having dwelt long enough in the not-knowing, for something to unfold. When I photograph myself, I am not seeking to represent the body, but to dwell with it. To let it speak in its own way, on its own time. The body, in this moment, is not a subject to be shown — it is a channel through which affect and memory are made manifest.

In this way, the bathroom becomes more than a backdrop; it is activated as a phenomenological threshold. Phenomenology—concerns itself with how the world is lived and experienced through the body, prior to conceptual interpretation (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Moran 1999). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I understand this space not as physical architecture but as lived relation. We do not encounter the world as detached observers; we inhabit it with our whole body, our skin, our senses. The fogged mirror, then, becomes a site of encounter—between interior and exterior, self and self-image. It is through this lens that the fog, the space, and the mood of the bathroom gain meaning—not as objects, but as relational experiences unfolding through time, memory, and sensation. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957) offers a compelling meditation on domestic spaces as poetic spaces—spaces that hold reverie and memory. In my work, the bathroom, becomes a site of solitude and meditation. It is private, humid, liminal. In the steamed mirror, the body is unmoored from clarity, and yet deeply felt. The image lingers rather than declares. The fogged mirror does not simply reflect the figure; it refracts it through mood, hesitation, and affect. The photograph does not capture the body but dwells with it—lingering in a moment where the self is felt more than seen. Hill (2009), drawing on Heidegger’s notion of poetic dwelling, writes that space becomes meaningful when we reside poetically, allowing our environment to meet us in our interiority. The bathroom, then, becomes a threshold — not only between wet and dry, privacy and exposure, but between sensation and expression, between the feeling that precedes language and the image that follows.

Visibility in these images is fragmented, dispersed, like breath settling on glass; the self is suggested, then emerges in traces—felt through the grain of surface, the hush of s the faint resonance of being. Jones (2002) argues that self-portrait photography is less about presenting a unified subject than it is about engaging the viewer in a negotiation of presence, embodiment, and relationality. My images reflect this view. The blur becomes a device of both concealment and revelation—it protects the self even as it gestures toward its emotional reality. The fogged mirror does not offer clarity. Instead, it stages a kind of intimate sublime. Clewis (2021) reframes the sublime as not necessarily vast or dramatic, but as aesthetic awe that occurs in moments that suspend ordinary perception. My photographs live in that pause. They do not demand attention but invite stillness. The images ask the viewer to remain—to dwell. They evoke what Severin and Petrovici (2022) identify as the emotional dimension of the sublime—that which unsettles gently, through feeling. Here, the sublime is not in scale, but in stillness. In gentleness, not grandeur.

The emotional ambiguity within the images lingers as a form of reflective longing. The images in this series hold memory as atmosphere. They carry the residue of something once felt, not fully grasped. The fog mirrors memory: elusive, tactile, suggestive. Each photograph is not a capture of a moment, but a holding of emotional residue. The titles—My Heart Breaks Like Surf, Amidst the Breakers, The Wind Rises—function as poetic fragments. They hint at mood, gesture toward meaning, but leave space for the viewer to enter with their own associations. They allow space for slowness, interpretation and reflection. What emerges is less a fixed statement than a shifting atmosphere—like mist, diffuse, fleeting, unresolved.

The relationship between photography and affect, body and reflection are illuminated in Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971). I encountered this work not long after beginning this series and was struck by the parallels. During a period of spiritual and intellectual searching, Piper photographed herself in front of a mirror, capturing moments of dissolution and reconstitution. She spent an extended period in isolation—fasting, meditating, and obsessively reading

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. A camera and tape recorder were set up by the mirror, and whenever she felt herself beginning to disappear, she would take a photo of herself or record a repetitive reading of a line from Kant. Her act of looking into the mirror—of capturing the moment when the body seems to dissolve—resonated deeply with my own impulse to record the self as a  . Piper’s practice was not concerned with self-display, but with self-confirmation. Likewise, my work does not seek to exhibit the body, but to be with it—to dwell with it in moments of unknowing, feeling, and presence. In both cases, the photograph affirms vulnerability rather than visibility.

Central to Piper’s methodology is her concept of the indexical present, shaped by Kantian and Vedic philosophy. This concept situates art within the immediacy of lived experience, making presence foundational to both the act of making and its meaning. The indexical present bridges the ephemeral nature of action with the enduring qualities of material trace. These traces forge a connection between the physical act of creation and the temporal or existential states it reflects, transforming the artwork into a site of resonance. As Piper notes, ‘My work springs from a belief that we are transformed—and occasionally reformed—by immediate experience, independently of our abstract evaluations of it and despite our attempts to resist it’ (Piper 1990:3). This understanding of transformation through immediacy underpins both her practice and my own—grounding the photographic process in presence, vulnerability, and the quiet affirmations of the self.

The images in this series hold memory as atmosphere. They carry the residue of something once felt, not fully grasped. Theory does not explain the image. It accompanies it. It helps name what the body already knows. The image is not an argument. It is a mood. A moment. A manifestation of thought through feeling. The fog, the skin, the light—all become forms of thought. This is not work that seeks to be resolved, but to be felt. It resists fixity in favour of lingering. The image, like the body, is in process. The process is inherently slow. It resists the demand for resolution. It unfolds over time, through repetition, through return. I return to the bathroom not to recreate a moment, but to dwell again in the conditions that allow one to arise. The photograph is not proof of an event. It is a residue of relation.

Ultimately, this practice invites presence rather than interpretation. The viewer is not asked to decipher, but to linger—to let the image work on them, slowly, softly. The work is not complete. It is continuous. A series of arrivals, always partial, always open. The image, like the body, remains in flux. These photographs are not documents of the self. They are devotions to it. They arise from the pre-sense, from the felt insistence that something must be held. They do not explain. They offer. They remain. In this way, I do not see myself as the author of the image, but as its listener. It’s vessel. It’s witness. The work is not about being seen. It is about being present.

 

Reference List

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