I AM ALIVE launched in NYC!

It was a truly heart felt night and to be surrounded by so many people I love and have known over the decades was a gift.

I AM ALIVE in conversation with Sonya Bekkerman with Beneville Studio

Above is the link to video of the conversation Sonya Bekkerman led at Beneville Studio earlier this month.

It was important for me to have Sonya lead the talk as this book carries so much weight, trauma, sadness, acceptance and joy.

Sonya was one of the first people I shared my drawings with on her first visit to India in 2012. She was navigating a completely different world to mine: I was in my 3rd year of recovery from cancer, planting trees, praying, wearing sarees and living at the guest house of Sri Narayani Peedam in South India while Sonya was running the Russian department in Sotherby’s in NYC. Sonya belonged to the world I knew before I was diagnosed but by 2012, but that world felt so far away from me as I struggled with depression and PTSD. I immediately enjoyed her company: she was visiting India with her sculptor uncle, who was larger than life. Big heart. Huge embrace to life. Sonya was intellectually sharp, deep in her observations and very funny. They both made me laugh a lot. When she looked at my drawings for the first time, she wept. I was moved that she was so emotional in seeing the drawings. She understood.

Sonya has quite the talent of creating a narrative. She linked up my earlier photography work (Russia, China, Australian creatives living around the world) as my era of travel and looking out into the the world.

I was searching to understand what it meant to be a human being.

Next, she swerved into the next chapter of my life: DIAGNOSIS & CRISIS where my next series is of me photographing myself in waiting rooms, in between scans, blood tests and doctor visits at Institut Marie Curie in Paris as I traversed the diagnosis of stage 3 cervical cancer. These images, she noted were of me turning my camera on myself for the first time. Until the talk, I hadn’t even noticed this shift. It was a natural response for me to keep photographing my world. And then the photography stopped: I was stuck in bed in radiation for 7 days and 7 nights, pinned down. And this is where the drawing began.

Now looking back at the talk, the narrative seems so obvious… however, I just couldn’t see it until that night. I had felt that my life as a photographer, as an artist had stopped with the diagnosis. But now I see is that I was doing was responding to my circumstance. The spirit of the artist had never left me.

I am so grateful for how Sonya navigated the talk with such attention and wisdom. It was an emotional talk to give and I wasn’t expecting to start choking up when I read out, Love Poem to Life. I heard myself apologising for my tears, “I am sorry.” Then I quickly corrected myself, “I am not sorry.” Then I explained how I never ever imagined to be able to return to life the way I had, for which I am extremely grateful. The grief is always there tucked away, appearing unexpectedly to remind me that this is a process to honour. And the joy is there to be shared and experienced.