Juliana's Dream
“For the serpent shedding its skin, to be, as it were born again, is likened in the Orient to the reincarnating spirit that assumes and throws off bodies as a man puts on and puts off clothes” Joseph Campbell The Emergence of Mankind in Myths To Live By Yuliana’s Dream coherently depicts through the visual sequential narrative of still photography and material construction. The work as a whole creates a discourse through the material and the visual of material, materiality, the symbolic, the spiritual and the natural. The three garments themselves create a series that is echoed in the elegiac framed images that reveal the girl as present but not present as real but distant. The unworn garment is a symbolic form in itself of the daily sequences of our lives, which inform the narrative of being. The narrative of the setting recalls the works of Herman Hess and the mythology that lies in mythological rites of passage. The child is in her Garden of Eden; her garments reflect the fragility of thought and innocence. The beauty of the world around Yuliana is a wonder to behold as she touches the fragile fabric that sits between her and the sensual world of childhoods’ end.