‘As in a Mirror, Dimly’

How do we find power when we feel powerless? When my sister Beth died suddenly, the victim of a broken healthcare system, I vainly held her body as I had decades earlier when we were children, tracing secret messages on each other’s backs in the dark. She was here, but she was gone — transformed into a photograph, a presence defined by absence. The unknowns surrounding her loss, the broken systems that failed her, and the official indifference of those in power left my family without answers or peace. In the wake of her passing, my work became a meditation on care, grief, and the unseen forces that shape life and death.

‘As in a Mirror, Dimly’ draws inspiration from the psychomanteum — a device used for spirit communication — from the ectoplasm photography of mediums generations ago, and from Victorian-era spiritualism. The works in this series merge photography with ritual, memory with material, in a search for connection beyond the veil. The project builds upon my previous immersive installation sync/swim, which explored the act of swimming with my sisters, embodying memory through performance and image. Following Beth’s death, my practice turned inward, becoming a form of searching — each photograph, each object an extension of my relationship with her, a talisman against loss.

Photography, both artistically and spiritually, is a medium in this body of work, it is a sacred means of reaching toward what is gone. The objects within ‘As in a Mirror, Dimly’ — icons of luck, ritual, and protection — form an armor for navigating grief, fashion a tether line into the hereafter, and grasp with determination for presence in the face of absence.

Documentation by Jenny Fine and Chanel Matsunami Govreau