Transparent Pause examines the suspension of organic time through the act of freezing. By encasing living branches and leaves in ice, these photographs document a state between life and death, growth and stasis, presence and preservation. The ice functions simultaneously as preservative and prison, transparent container and sculptural medium, creating a liminal space where botanical specimens become artifacts of interrupted temporality.
Unlike taxidermy or herbarium preservation, which renders organisms definitively dead, freezing maintains an ambiguous state—a pause rather than an ending. The plant matter retains its color, its form, its apparent vitality, yet exists in suspended animation. This work explores the aesthetics and ethics of this suspension: the beauty of arrested decay, the violence of preservation, the desire to hold what inevitably passes.
Transparent Pause #01
The interplay of transparency is central to the work. Ice encases the specimens; glass vessels contain the ice; light penetrates these multiple layers, creating complex optical effects—refraction, reflection, distortion. The camera must navigate these nested transparencies, revealing how seeing itself is an act of penetration through barriers. What appears immediate is actually mediated through multiple interfaces, each altering our perception of the subject within.
The photographs emphasize materiality: the cloudiness of freezing water, the air bubbles trapped in ice, the condensation forming on glass surfaces, the crystalline structure of frost. These imperfections and artifacts of the freezing process become part of the composition, reminding viewers that preservation is never neutral—it always leaves traces, always transforms what it seeks to maintain. The act of stopping time is itself a temporal intervention, a mark upon the thing preserved.
Transparent Pause #02
The work participates in photography's historical relationship with preservation and death. Since its invention, photography has been understood as a way to stop time, to preserve what passes. Yet these images question whether such preservation is possible or desirable. The frozen branches will eventually thaw and decay; the photograph itself only captures a moment in a longer process of transformation. What we preserve is not the thing itself but an image of suspension, not life but the appearance of life arrested.
These photographs invite contemplation of our relationship with natural cycles—our desire to control, to extend, to suspend the inevitable progressions of growth and decay. The beauty of the images belies the violence of intervention, the way preservation requires extraction from living context. Yet there is tenderness too in this gesture of holding, this attempt to extend the present moment, to make the ephemeral last a little longer before releasing it back to time's flow.
Transparent Pause #03
Transparent Pause #04
Transparent Pause #05
