Nina Lieska

About

SUSPENDED

Balanced in buoyancy. 

Water is life. Water gives life.

Incubated in the sanctity of the womb’s sacred waters. 

Coated fluidity in our exit, ritualised washing.

First breath.

Emergent life. 

Enduring pulsation of life between breaths, in and out. 

Last breath. 

Life suspended. 

Through dreams and the liminal space interfacing the human body and water, Suspended delves into the interplay of liquidity and corporeality, the amorphous state of fluidity and physicality where everything spills into everything else. A confluence of thinking and being that unites us in our constant becoming. Whole. 

Journeying towards transcendence, the Divine, death. Dust to dust, we are made up of minerals from the earth, upon death return to the earth. Metamorphosis, a process of transformation, a yearning for the Divine within the Self. Flesh is like a sandbar, moulded, shaped, shifted by the tides of life. Mirroring the fluidity of identity, in constant motion, the fleeting impermanence of reality. 

Water, as the veil between life and death, embodies the delicate threshold between existence and oblivion. In its depths, water holds both the promise of life, nourishing and sustaining, and the quiet stillness of death, where all returns to silence. 

If the story of a drowned Ophelia lingers, it is because these photographs are it’s inverse – a story of life’s blessing, it’s kiss, it’s prayer, it’s hope… The sacramental.