'Blank Verse' begins from a persistent sense of distance in how I experience and interpret the world, as if perception itself were slightly displaced. At its centre is the question of how we perceive an “other” when their experience can never be fully accessible to us. As I grow older, I increasingly wonder what actually happens between us: do we spend our lives interracting with constructed versions of others through our own perceptions, while remaining, in some essential way, separate? When do we truly 'meet'?

I needed a space in which this ambiguity could be held and explored. Photography, a medium closely associated with truth, evidence, and the visible, yet shaped by an enduring debate around its relationship to reality, became a ground for approaching what resists certainty: the instability of perception and the difficulty of grasping anything beyond ourselves.

Moving between bodies, objects, landscapes and moments of visual contradiction, I ended up with images that seem to escape a fixed reading. Looking becomes less a way of knowing than a way of entering into relation: partial, intuitive, unstable, floating and liquid. 'Blank Verse' digs within gaps, between perceiving and understanding, observer and the observed, where what cannot be fully known is not resolved but held. Shedding light not towards an answer, but onto a porous form of attention.

Maria Siorba @mariasiorba