I only ever intended on being away for a year, but it’s true what they say, that time waits for no man!…And so it passed, the journey continued and whenever I returned to all that was familiar, the faces I knew, the places that once held me, I knew that whatever I was searching for had not yet been found.
I continued to photograph, trying to capture the ephemeral, the camera became not only the essential divide between me and the environment, the space to make sense of all that self is, it became the catalyst, forcing the never-ending question to knock even harder on the door of the mind, ‘who is the author of this narrative?’ is she fact or fiction?’ and the knower, what is it that she knows?’
‘Tales of Transience is a body of work still in progress. Behind the Veil forms a chapter, a series of images and writings produced from behind various mosquito nets over a period of several months, periods of time where I could do nothing but observe the world from a constantly changing perspective, a perspective that was being re-shaped by the Indian philosophy that I had come to study.
With the objectivity that the passing of time brings, the photographs have become quiet meditations, the story I tell of a women who once existed yet no longer is. As Freud states in his essay on Transience ‘What is painful may none the less be true’.
Content©Victoria Coster Tales of Transience 2023
‘Something that isn’t there’
Victoria Coster : Tales of Transience 