Artist's Statement

Love is the soul's vision of things invisible
Plotinus Enneads I, 6, 4

Body and soul, the focus of observation that has preoccupied me since the beginning of my artistic career, has expanded into exploration and engagement with internal organs, which I have been photographing over the last nine years. One day at the souk [open market], my eye inadvertently crossed something. I felt myself transfixed, but could not tell whether it I was being observed or it was I observing. It was a slaughtered cow's stomach. Mesmerized, I could not ignore the sensation of this chance encounter. I was struck by the type of thing you simply know, not with your visual sense, but with your soul, which sees without assistance, and discerns.

Body of Love is the first series which evolved from my encounter with the cow's stomach. I worked on the series for three years, until reaching its final frame. Its photographs depict the internal organs of a cow: a stomach in three positions, a uterus, an udder, intestines, and a bull's sexual organs. Each of these is suspended on hooks, but turned inside out, revealing them to the eye from within. All are photographed against an ironed and starched white sheet. Between the udder and the uterus, -"Jonathan"-, a photograph of my son in white on white, came into being.

The internal organs led me to the slaughterhouse, where I spent many hours. Following prolonged, intense contemplation of the activity there, I hung myself, upside-down, like a cow, spawning my "Self-Portrait, The Suspended Woman."

At the slaughterhouse, I discovered additional organs of which I had not previously been aware; unidentified organs as far as I was concerned, smaller and lighter than the ones I photographed in Body of Love, and which gave rise to the series Garden of Organs. I was awestruck. I was moved and enchanted at the beauty of these normally invisible parts.

In my photographs I strive to extract the beauty visible to my mind's eye. To lend new form, content, and place to things which, for me, touch upon philosophical "truth."

Sheffy Bleier, 2010