A home holds our family history, the deep roots of our identity hidden in our hopes, dreams and nightmares. As man continues to build in increasingly precarious areas, nature has begun to re-claim its territory, putting our shelter, and everything bound within, at risk. My work, rooted in my personal experience with Hurricane Katrina, explores the interior room as it becomes the setting for the psychological struggle of reconciling the outside world with the inside world.

The physicality of the interior: the architecture, the details, imply class and economic issues as well as psychological issues of identity. In my images, the light is omnipresent – leading the viewer through the space, sometimes as a character, sometimes as a narrator. Light evokes a psychological response, heightening the tension of perception - where is it coming from, what does it illuminate? – that goes beyond the physical into the imagination of the viewer. By entering the space through a window or doorway, the light is as inaccessible as it is present.

My work is an attempt to offer the viewer an experience, if not physically then psychologically. By planting the seeds of a narrative that the viewer completes, my work participates in the idea of imperfect truth, emphasizing the distinction, or lack thereof, between what is real and what is fiction.

Kate Stewart Nicholson