Bridges and Barriers

Bridges and Barriers is a multimedia visual work that examines the limits of language in depression. Using metaphor as a method, it translates inner experience into photographs, videos, and objects to open a space of careful approach.

“Bridges and Barriers” is a photographic series about the limits of language in the context of depression and about how experiences can be communicated when words no longer hold. Many people affected describe that inner states resist reliable description. This difficulty of translation can create distance, intensify misunderstanding and isolation, and leave loved ones in their own kind of speechlessness, wanting to be present but unsure how.

My work focuses on the potential of metaphor. Metaphors do not explain. They open associative spaces in which complexity can persist, making experience shareable by rendering the abstract tangible. Since 2022, I have collected metaphorical descriptions of depressive experience through an anonymous survey I designed with 85 participants, alongside literary research.

The series translates this material into staged photographs of everyday and natural objects and situations. I work in a controlled manner and use reduction to direct attention toward the metaphor I am attempting to translate. Accidental or distracting elements are largely removed so that viewers can focus on the object or scene and its shifted meaning. Through close ups, precise framing that isolates objects and scenes, and subtle shifts in context and function, I explore a recurring description of depression, the way the familiar can become strange and ordinary tasks can take on a different weight, logic, or urgency. I am drawn to subjects in deterioration and loss of function, such as animal remains, moulding food, or a damaged soft toy, things that usually receive little attention and are quickly discarded once they no longer serve a purpose.

Although each work translates a particular metaphor, the project ultimately centres on the viewer’s attempt to read and complete it. Meaning emerges in that encounter, as personal images and emotions are projected back into the work. The video works extend this open field of interpretation through duration and physical endurance. They trace processes of decay, breakdown, and dissolution, and linger on held gestures and poses, such as sustaining a smile or balancing on tiptoes, as exhaustion and discomfort gradually surface.

My perspective is that of an outsider, shaped by the desire to understand and the awareness that depression can never be fully grasped from the outside. Each image remains a proposal, not a definition. The project aims to build a bridge and open a space of careful approach for people who are still searching for words and for those who have already found them.