The cycle represents a myse an abyme of negative and positive photography providing a curious synthesis of time and place. The images within images show sculptures of the female shape that repose in the ashen vegetation of a graveyard landscape. Moss covers the inorganic curves of the stone flesh, indicating the eternal metamorphoses of death and rebirth, Eros and Thanatos, past and future, the flows and shifts in which every action has a corresponding reaction, every black its white, each color its contrasting complement, each purple its yellow. The photographs were then placed in nature and photgraphed themselves. The image surface becomes an alchemisitic place that underlines the flux of eternal reversals: of black and white, absence and presence, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. “The Ashen Picture” contrasts two seminal ideas: that photography embalms life and that it turns it to ashes. The series tests the possibilities and limits of the medium to navigate between the visible and the invisible, to both capture the phenomena of the visible material world and suggest the shadowy world of specters. By exploring the notion of photography’s “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin) in this way, the series meditates on the inextricable web of connections where the flesh turns to ashes, then returns as organic matter – a flower, a tree, or the moss that mimics a skin layer on the stone. All these metamorphoses are entangled in the image surface of the world, the next transformation lurks in the moment to follow.