First Sweet Truth
2019—2023
Kloster Helfta is a Cistercian convent in Eisleben, Germany, a rural, former copper-mining town a few hours south of Berlin. In the late 13th century, however, Kloster Helfta was a fertile site of female mysticism. The three mystics of Helfta—Mechthild of Magdeburg, Mechthild of Hackeborn, and Gertrude of Helfta—were prolific writers, a result of the monastic culture at Helfta which uniquely encouraged women’s intellectual labor. Their writings all insist on a direct, firsthand encounter with the divine that challenged the patriarchal culture of their time. These books form the single largest body of female mystical literature of the Middle Ages and some of the earliest known writing by women in the West.
At once an historical inquiry, a personal pilgrimage, and an investigation into the continued relevance of these women’s writings, my project has taken me to the very place these mystics lived. Between 2019-2022, I visited Kloster Helfta three times: first, for three days in 2019, then three weeks in 2020, before returning and living at the convent for three months in 2021-22, with the support of a Fulbright grant. The nine sisters who live at Helfta today have become my guides, collaborators, and friends. For them, Helfta is still ripe with the presence of God.
In my photographs, I draw on the metaphors these mystics used—honey, mirrors, knives, breasts—as well as document specific sites, such as an indentation in the wall marking the doorframe where Gertrude had her first vision. Many photographic theorists draw on religious language to speak of the medium—that photographs, like icons, have the potential to be both image and presence, a representation and a site of revelation. Likewise, I use emptiness and metaphor to draw on an affective mode of perception rather than visual perception alone, examining the space between both seeing and unseeing, the visible and invisible.
Drawing lines between past and present, I turn to the camera—a tool long used to conjure the invisible—to touch the wound, as the mystics write, a kind of seeing-as-touching. Rather than look to the camera as a tool for truth-as-evidence, I turn to it instead for truth-as-disclosure. In doing so, I explore how photography’s failure might be the source of its revelatory power.
In a contemporary digital landscape informed by algorithms and data-driven forms of knowledge, mystical experience inherently defies the logic of our time. In a constant flow of images, we tend to assume seeing is a disembodied act. Our eyes skim, understand, move on—what the philosopher Laura Marks calls seeing-as-mastering. In contrast, I am interested in what this lineage of female visionary experience reveals about a kind of seeing that instead gestures towards the flowering of reality and the ineffable found at the edges of our vision.
“Texts do not mean the world, but the images which they tear up.” —Vilém Flusser
