The little community where my desert cabin sits is famous for its hot springs and its healing clays. I have been wanting to incorporate the clays into a series that impacts the viewer (and the subject - me) with emotion, with a deep sense of purification, with a new insight into beauty, with healing, a peeling back or cracking of harmful and oppressive facades, etc. It's funny, how we think of beauty. I've been guilty of fretting over hair, over makeup, over accessories, over clothing, and yet ... here I am, with no makeup, dirty and messy hair and feel sublimely beautiful with a face-full of "dirt." There is nothing in these images that would ever be classified as high-fashion, and yet ... I feel organically glamorous ... much like a delicate pottery sculpture. That's part of the mystery I hope to study within this series.

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Reviews -

"These images evoke the type of sensibility found in Richard Avedon's American West photographs like the oil field worker or the man with bees. The direct, beautiful portrait by a prominent fashion photographer,but the subject is covered in mud, oil or bees. You have taken the image to that type of level, and using the self portrait, making the viewer think about contemporary topics : women, decay, decline, yet somehow beautiful radiating through the mud." - Artist/Photographer Robin Temaiana Repp