A Woman In A Raw Form
"The robes Marina asked me to wear covered most of my skin but I felt naked and vulnerable. Makeup was minimal and my hair was in its natural wavy state, one that I wrangle with and straighten every day.
Nausea, tension and low mood were visitors in my home the day that Marina arrived to shoot a boudoir series of photos. My shoulders were around my ears, my eyes felt watery and my smile felt forced, the quote fake it until you make it was my mantra. I thought that this experience would give me confidence and would release me from the funk that I had been in. I was struggling with confidence issues.
My boy was testing every parenting boundary. I felt like I was failing as his mum which led me to also feeling as though I was lacking as a wife, because, we just couldn’t get on the same page no matter how hard we tried. Shift work was adding to the stress. I had stopped writing which is an outlet for me to release tension, see the bigger picture and find gratitude.
Marina with love and grace guided me through the boudoir shoot, she kept me engaged and focussed. She held a vision for how she intended for me to view myself in her art. Marina rearranged furniture, pulled books off bookshelves, and used my most beautiful tea set, hung meters of sheer material for a backdrop, and made use of our very own yellow brick path in our enchanted forest.
The day that I visited Marina to collect the images we sat at her kitchen table over her delicious homemade pancakes and coffee, we chatted and caught up, with pride, she gifted me a framed and unframed image of the boudoir shoot.
Of course, I loved them. However, it was beyond visually loving the images. I had come a little further down the path of my journey by this time and when I looked at the woman in the photos, I saw me. The woman that actually does wear robes around the house and the material gliding over my body makes me feel feminine and graceful, I saw the woman with the wild untamed hair that is my hair and it’s gorgeous, the woman that reads and writes to be educated, to have an alternate view of the world, to be thankful, to escape into another story. I saw the woman that had worked hard in being a woman, wife, mother, sister, friend and all the “roles” that I am.
However, all the roles and the pressure that I had put on myself over the last few months shed from my being as I meditated on the images. I am a woman who is doing the best she can in her “roles” and ultimately I am a just that, a woman. I looked at me and thought it is ok to feel naked and vulnerable in every way, this is how I learn and grow and move beyond comfort, I needed to see me truthfully in a raw form.
Thank you, Marina, for showing me, me, in your art. "
