Pins and Needles is a large format photographic series combining portraits, landscapes, and other staged scenes. This work evokes an emergence of senses – a whole generation awakening after the long pandemic winter and who is slowly learning to feel again. I have been trying to convey physical sensations through photography; particularly this feeling of having pins and needles, of waking up from a numbness. To me, this work is like a hatching, a blooming. It is about stretching out our limbs, shaking off the languor. It is about finally coming out, opening the door, being blinded by the Sun.

Even though this series was born in the late covid, it is not a project about this moment that impacted us all. Rather, it is about the universal experience of getting back to our senses, getting back to our body. It is about the relation, and sometimes disconnect, that we entertain with our environment.
Pins and Needles is about a desire to connect –an attempt at translating multi-sensorial experiences in a visual manner, to notice the elements present and the passing phenomena, and to stage them, recreate them into photographs. We live in a hyper-connected world yet it seems that we’re always seeking other forms of connections, deeper, more authentic, with each other, with our environment. We are looking for a grounding, an osmosis. The people who are photographed in the series seem to be suspended in time, they are in inadequacy with their environment, not knowing how to act, to interact. This series represents for me this state of vulnerability, and of receptivity we find ourselves in – our senses in full alert.

The recreation of moments that seem mundane, the exaggeration of certain gestures, the lighting, are all methods I use here to evoke a certain strangeness. The juxtaposition of people, places and objects we wouldn’t necessarily imagine together become elements that we question and that nourish the notion of “not-quite” that inhabits the series. Through photographic staging, a cinematic lighting and indiscernible characters, I navigate the blur and create a narration guided by suggestion. We are left wondering what happened just before the image or what will happen right after.

This project talks of touching and of being touched, of reaching a hand in front of us and seeing what responds.

The images were taken in Sausalito, CA; Vancouver, BC, and all over France. Almost all the people photographed are artists.