Holy Water

There is something every woman understands about wanting to start over. About carrying more than her share for longer than she should have. About being ready (finally, unmistakably ready) to put it down.

I had been circling this idea for a while before I had a name for it. Little fragments of it kept showing up in my own self-portrait work — the question of what is holy, what we protect, what we're willing to let go of. I didn't know yet what it wanted to become. I just knew it wasn't finished with me.

Then I went to Paris.

I won't pretend the trip handed me the answer in some cinematic moment. It was quieter than that. Walking through a city that has spent centuries deciding what belongs in a museum and what doesn't, surrounded by work that has outlived everyone who made it, something in me settled. The idea didn't change. It sharpened. I came home knowing exactly what I wanted to build, and who I wanted to build it with.

Before I left, I told her (the first woman to step into this project with me) that I knew I would be coming back inspired. That I already had ideas forming. That I wanted us to create together the moment I returned.

I meant it as a promise. I didn't fully know yet what I was promising.

What I came home with was Holy Water.

The concept is simple to say and harder to live inside of. A woman writes a letter to herself before she arrives — to whoever she needs to address it to, about whatever she's ready to release. She brings that letter with her into the studio and reads it out loud. Water is poured over her hair. Her garments cling to her body. The water itself is nothing special. What happens between her and the camera is the entire point.

I keep coming back to the word holy because I don't think it belongs only to churches and ceremonies. I think it belongs to ordinary moments that we decide, together, to treat as sacred. A woman choosing to be witnessed. A woman finally saying the thing out loud. That's holy to me. Maybe it always has been.

This first session confirmed something I'd hoped but couldn't have known for certain — that the idea would actually hold weight once a real person stepped into it. It did. More than I expected. Watching her read her own letter back to herself, watching the water do something to her that had nothing to do with temperature or weight, I understood that this project was never really about water at all. It's about release. It's about survival. It's about what we're finally ready to become.

I don't know yet exactly what this project will become (if anything at all), or exactly where it will end up living. I just hope it will keep growing — more women, more letters, more water. The shape of it is still revealing itself to me as I go.

What I do know is the reason behind it has nothing to do with a destination. The reason is every woman who's ever stood in a shower and let the water carry something away that words couldn't. The reason is the letter she hasn't written yet. The reason is whatever you're still carrying that was never yours to carry.

If that's you — if something in this is already calling to you — I'd love to hear from you.