Ilaria Serra

Liminal Reflections

Liminal Reflections is a series about making sense of the self, integrating introspective practice and visual elements to translate the emotional atmosphere of daydreams into tangible images. The work investigates how blurred, unarticulated emotions shape a fragmented sense of identity, and how the façade built to cope with overwhelming thoughts can conceal underlying aspects of the inner self. Through these images, I explore the tension between what I consciously accept and what remains hidden, examining the process of unveiling the emotions I habitually suppress.Daydreaming sits at the center of this project as both practice and problem. It unfolds as drifting attention, where inner focus loosens the grip of linear time and allows thought to wander. This movement carries the ambivalence of how daydreaming can support reflection and creativity while also functioning as avoidance and emotional intolerance, creating distance from presence. The images allow this contradiction to surface visually, converting mental drift into blur, colour, and physical gesture. The body becomes the site where these internal states hover, neither fully contained nor fully disclosed.The photographs are made in a studio that functions as a stage rather than a place. Working with coloured gels, RGBs, and strobe lights, I construct gradients where colours dissolve into one another enabling the images to hold the gap between what I tell myself I’ve accepted and what still moves underneath. In a setting that is full yet strangely empty, these colours surround the figure like emotions that cannot be touched or spoken. The space becomes a threshold between realities – conscious and unconscious, acceptance and surrender, real and unreal. The visual language of the work approaches the image surface as a negotiation between presentation and concealment. Sheer fabrics become physical metaphors for a crafted self, a mask, while shadow and blur unsettle that surface, preventing it from resolving fully. As facial expression recedes, affect shifts into posture and meaning is carried by how the body holds itself in space, how it yields, and how it remains unfinished.The process that builds this sense of suspension begins by establishing an emotional framework and acting by suggestion rather than instruction, allowing the models’ interpretations of movement to arise in the in‑between. Back and rim lighting articulate outlines, while shadows interrupt clarity; shadow is treated not as absence alone but as productive opacity, a necessary space for projection that keeps the image open. Together with slow shutter speeds and multiple exposures, this approach shapes the way attention drifts and overlaps, creating echoes of motion and a hovering temporality. Although the project grows from personal introspection, it remains a record of approach rather than disclosure. What matters is not that viewers uncover my personal narrative, but that they recognize something of their own interior world in these atmospheres, dwelling within uncertainty rather than resolving it. The photographs exist as reflections of my own self, suspended long enough to be seen, yet never fully understood.

“Here I dwell in that liminal space, still.”