The work of Teresa Flowers holds the space of both magic and realism, near extinction and rebirth. Her photos are stunning. A storm of motion and raw beauty that calls forth the image of a woman both struggling against and singing within the body’s birdcage.
Using her own body as a tool of representation enables Flowers’ work to exist in both personal and universal realms. These photographs travel from devastating anguish, through ritual to rebirth. In many of the photos, the body is blurred, constantly running, crouching, spinning, and seeking either reason or release within the context of the photograph. Flowers frames these photos in destroyed buildings, vacant back lots or in flowing water from an underground crater. Everything speaks of destruction, but the body’s rattle and the elegant renderings of frame provide the viewer with a startling sense of hope. This is not merely a body wrestling with anguish, it is a soul reaching forward, striving to crack the egg of itself.
Several photos in the collection are sensual in the purest, most unaffected of ways. There is a serenity to the photos, a quiet exhalation. There is no death here, no blur of struggle, and no rattle of the body’s birdcage. These photos are in color. There is no irony here, simply the truth that in grief we are naked and that, as the color floods back, the body’s adornments are just that- adornments. The soul, in finding itself again, fills the body with color.
