Artist Statement 

I took this photograph while standing over a shallow rain pool, the kind that forms briefly and disappears without ceremony. At first, I was looking down at stones—ordinary, textured, dry. Then the sky appeared, not above me but beneath my feet. The reflection held clouds in motion and the stark silhouette of a leafless tree stretching outward in quiet reach. What was grounded became atmospheric. What was overhead became submerged.

This inversion stopped me.

In my work, I am often drawn to threshold spaces, places where categories soften and perception shifts. The puddle functioned as a temporary portal, holding two realities at once: earth and sky, solidity and reflection, body and atmosphere. The tree, stripped of leaves, appeared skeletal yet expansive, its branches tracing delicate lines across the reflected light. In black and white, the image resists distraction. Texture, contrast, and form take precedence. The stones hold weight; the sky holds breath.

I recognize myself in this doubling. Scholarly Personal Narrative asks the researcher to stand inside the frame rather than outside it, to acknowledge how inner landscape and outer landscape speak to one another. In this moment, I felt the convergence of both. I was looking down, but I was also looking inward. The bare branches mirrored the feeling of emotional exposure that accompanies deep reflective work. The clouds suggested movement, transition, impermanence. Nothing fixed. Nothing final.

Black and white photography allows me to remain with essence. It removes the seduction of colour and asks harder questions about structure, shadow, and truth. Here, the absence of colour feels appropriate. This was not a moment of vibrancy but of clarity. A quiet recognition that reflection—both literal and methodological—requires stillness, requires the willingness to look beneath surface appearances.

The puddle will evaporate. The reflection will vanish. The tree will continue standing elsewhere, unchanged by my witnessing. Yet the encounter remains. This is the work of SPN: to hold fleeting moments as sites of knowledge, to understand that meaning often reveals itself in brief alignments between body, place, and perception.

I left the pool undisturbed. I did not step through it. Some reflections are meant only to be seen, not entered.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026