Kirstin Naomie Broussard

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

My work explores the nature of identity and perception both literally and metaphorically. Through performance and deliberate manipulation of the camera’s mechanism, I create narrative landscapes that simultaneously dissolve and coalesce. Still Life In Eve’s Garden is an ongoing series in which I re-imagine and perform the myth of Eve, separate from Adam. Who and what is Eve when self-defined, unfettered, and given her own voice? Myths, like a kind of grammar, define our memory of ourselves across generations. I find myself longing for a new syntax. This Eve is her own creator, a disruption, a fantasy of herself. She is both master and victim of her own image, a body rooted in nature, informed by touch: myriad, shifting. The photographs are constructed in multiple ways: cliché verre prints made with ink on glass plates, scans of the forest floor interwoven with hand-stitched gold thread. All rely on simple optics: shadow, reflection, intentional light leaks and a play between positive and negative in which the boundaries between figure and ground are intentionally blurred. It is through touch that we come to know ourselves in relation to others. Touch places us. A kind of mapping, it asserts, “I begin here.”

Artwork