Orange Aura

“Orange” is a self-portrait series born from rupture, reformation, and radical self-return. Created in the quiet aftermath of trauma—rape, abortion, and the isolating return to a small hometown—this work began as an instinctive gesture: wrapping myself in an orange sheet and photographing my body at the historic landmarks of my youth. I didn’t yet know what it meant, only that it had to be orange.

At first, the fabric served as a barrier—a way to be seen without revealing, a way to exist while grieving. The sheet became a second skin, heavy with unspoken memory. But over time, what started as concealment became transformation. As the project evolved, the sheet softened, became sheer, luminous. I began to move differently—freely, with purpose. What was once a visual shroud became a veil of emergence.

This work marks the shift from seeking the woman I used to be to meeting the woman I was always meant to become. In solitude, I began the slow, sacred act of reinhabiting my body—not as a site of violation, but as a vessel of vitality, artistry, and selfhood. These images are quiet but expansive, grounding me in place while unbinding me from past narratives.

I later learned that an orange aura represents creativity, vitality, sensuality, ambition—qualities I had feared lost but found renewed within me through the act of making. The colour, chosen by intuition, proved to be a mirror. It reflected not just my healing, but my hunger—for life, for expression, for truth.

“Orange” is not about erasing what happened to me. It’s about metabolizing pain into meaning. It’s about giving form to invisible truths. It’s about the body as archive, as altar, as artist. And most of all, it is a love letter to the quiet strength found in choosing to stay—and create—when leaving seemed easier.

This piece exists within the broader constellation of my work exploring identity, body image, neurodivergence, and self-perception through photography and self-styling. Like much of my art, it resists linear recovery narratives. Instead, it honours the cyclical, the nonlinear, the slow and often silent reclamation of self through creative practice.