Duality; The Beginnings of a personal project
Exploring Duality: Art, Neuro Diversity, and the Space Between through photomontage
Open calls for art can be a tricky thing. As an artist, I often find myself wondering whether my work will fit a brief—or more importantly, whether it should. Rarely do I create something specifically to match an open call, because there’s always a risk: the work might stray too far from the path I’ve been walking. It can lead you somewhere completely new, and as a result somewhere disconnected from your current practice.
My practice is rooted in digital photomontage: cutting and collaging fragments of photographs to form new, often surreal, compositions. I tend to work with landscapes and seascapes—spaces devoid of people, quiet places of introspection.
However, the brief from Sussex Contemporary last year caught my attention. The theme? Duality. It lingered in my mind, aligning with reflections I’d already had for some time. What is duality, really? At its core, it’s the idea that something—or someone—can hold two opposing truths at once. That a single experience, identity, or object can exist in tension, in balance, or in contradiction with itself.
This idea struck home in a very personal way.
Diagnosed at 53
Recently, I was diagnosed as autistic. I’m 53. Never once did it occur to me before that I was Autistic. I’d always known I approached things differently—certain tasks were hard, certain environments overwhelming—but I’d always found workarounds. Doesn’t everyone? My normal was just… my normal.
Everything shifted when my children were diagnosed as neurodiverse. As I began to understand their needs, I also began to understand myself. The outdated stereotypes I’d grown up with—the “Rain Man” portrayals and rigid misconceptions—never aligned with who I was. And yet, there it was. I’d spent a lifetime adapting, masking, finding work-arounds and feeling slightly on the outside of everything.
This realization cracked open something in me. The concept of duality no longer felt abstract—it felt lived.
Chairs, Reflection, and Self
Years before this, I had a visual idea: chairs. Empty chairs. A symbol of stillness, reflection, a pause amid the noise. I’ve always believed in stopping to sit and observe, to take refuge in quiet. It’s a simple act, but loaded with emotion.
With the Sussex brief in mind, I revisited this idea. I began photographing myself—two versions of me on chairs, in different poses—capturing opposing states of being within the same frame. I din’t really know what I was doing, what poses would be effective, or how they would fit together, but one image became a kind of self-dialogue.
When I cut out and combined the two self-portraits—layered, almost intertwined—they fit together in a way that was strangely poetic. The positions hadn’t been planned, but nevertheless something clicked. The image spoke without words.
Floating in Space
After finding a good combination of the figures, I hit a common artistic hurdle: context. My figures were floating in space, literally and figuratively. I introduced texture, tried abstract, patterned backgrounds, but eventually settled on placing the figures in a room thinking this would be less distracting. A single empty chair remained, adding a layer of quiet ambiguity.
After many iterations I decided to crop the image so the figures were more of a focus and I placed a screwed up piece of paper on the table to try to explain away the dilemma that the figures seemed to be having. I wasn’t sure whether this was too literal, trying to impose a meaning on the image rather than leaving it open to interpretation.
At first, I thought this piece was finished. But months later, another open call arrived—this one about ‘Exploring the space between the other and the self’. It placed a particluar empasis on living in a social media intense society. I considered submitting the same image, but since it didn’t quite fit, the brief pushed me to re-examine it.
A New Lens: Social Media and the Inner World
Through the lens of social media, the image began to transform. I started to see it as an exploration of internal versus external—the curated self versus the authentic, messy, chaotic self.
To express this, I layered a pixelated layerover the scene, a nod to the digital veneer we often present online. The other half remained grounded in a domestic, almost dull interior—symbolizing the ordinariness of reality. I added a phone on the table. A catalyst. A quiet explanation.
The final piece felt more resolved. It carried more weight, more tension. It still didn’t shout its message. Instead, it invites the viewer to look, to feel, to question. And in doing so, I found a new entry point into my ongoing exploration of duality.
The Slow Burn
I feel like this project is just beginning. It’s a slow burn, a deep well. My ideas form gradually, through making, not theorizing. I’m not one for neatly planned narratives—I discover meaning as I work, through trial, error, and intuition.
But I’m enjoying the process. This exploration of duality—of self and other, seen and unseen, virtual and real—feels rich and necessary. There’s still much to unpack and I want to involve others.
For now, I’ll keep photographing, layering, editing, deleting, starting again.
Because sometimes, in art as in life, the most powerful truths emerge not from clarity—but from contradiction.
