Somnimorphs is a body of multiple-exposure, light-painted photographs that investigates the threshold between emotion, trauma, and autistic perception, my particular way of sensing and organising experience. These images arise from a space where perception does not passively receive the world but actively constructs it, often producing impressions that feel elusive, warped, or difficult to articulate.

Approaching the camera as an expressive tool rather than a recording device, I work with extended, multiple exposures, using light and form as a material to build, interrupt, and layer within a single frame. These accumulated marks unsettle the idea of photography as a record of a single, objective instant, allowing the image instead to hold fragments, overlaps, and disruptions that echo internal experience.

The work centres on states that resist clear language yet shape how we perceive and act. The figures or forms that surface are unstable, hovering between recognition, strangeness and the alien, never fully resolved, continually shifting as if searching for coherence.

References to saints, false prophets, or internal presences point to the questions at the core of the series: what inhabits us beneath conscious thought? Are these traces of memory, embodiments of trauma, or mental constructs that protect or destabilise? How do we relate to them, through belief, resistance, or identification, and what occurs when the distinction between self and these entities begins to erode?

Autistic perception is integral to the work’s formation. Sensory experience can feel intensified and fragmented, while emotions often register as immediate, physical force. Rather than explaining this condition, the images attempt to translate it, forming a visual language that carries its intensity, ambiguity, and oscillation between insight and disorientation.

Darkness functions here as more than negative space; it becomes a deep, indeterminate field from which forms emerge and into which they dissolve. It offers no fixed meaning, instead inviting viewers to project their own interpretations and responses. As a result, the images operate less as representations and more as encounters that unfold differently for each person.

At their core, Somnimorphs offer temporary form to what cannot be fully grasped; the forces that move through us subtly or violently, without ever settling into clarity, and to hold them, however briefly, within view.