OUR BONES: CASSIDY FERRY
In each of these portraits, made through a combination of digital and analogue processes, I construct a world in which nature has failed, and where the absence of care is brought to light.
Drawing on surrealist photography and theatrical staging, the work imagines a parent and child bond that cannot be broken — one that goes below skin deep. In my darkest moments, I return to the fantasy that animals might offer a different model of relation: connection as entangled, messy, and impossible to abandon.
Set against a black void, bones become testimony to what remains after love has failed, and what stubbornly persists. The images ask how closeness can heal, yet also wound. They speak of abandonment while remaining irreducibly animal, already deadened within, yet still reaching to be held.
What first appears monstrous begins to resemble us. A mirror image emerges, reflecting the instincts we are taught to suppress: vulnerability, dependence, the desire to hold one another, and the difficulty of letting go. Many of us carry fractures within, and all the more reason to stay together.
Photographer: Cassidy Ferry