San Francisco, CA
Biography:
After getting a degree in photography from UC Berkeley, I studied architecture at California College of the Arts (CCA) before returning to my passion of image making. While my medium of choice is the camera, the spaces created by man-made structures are most often my subject. Combining my two affinities was a natural progression in a seven-year project entitled "Borderline" that explores the boundary between interior and exterior spaces merging in a third plane.
However, in 2005 the "Borderline" series came to a grinding halt due to a diagnosis of Breast Cancer. The battle to recover from the traumas of cancer focused my attentions on the nature of the physical body as a structure. Much like a hurricane ravages the landscape and the places we call home, chemotherapy ravages the body - the most fundamental of "homes". While issues of survival become paramount, the parallels between the structures we live in and the body we live within become startlingly clear. The resulting series, "Aftermath" chronicles that period in a direct and unflinching approach to the destruction and rebirth from the hurricane of Cancer.
As the doctors, with their knives and chemistry broke down the physical structure in which I lived, the relationship between the cellular self and the metaphysical self became glaringly clear. My body may not be me, but without it, I am something else entirely. I knew that my long held image of myself would be shattered. What would emerge would be a mystery.
Website: www.kerrymansfield.com
