"Immersed in shadow, faces turned away or concealed, the women seem intensely aware of soliciting the very gaze they evade ... 

​Physiognomy, comportment, feelings are all revealed not through light but through darkness; shadows give us access to elements of the self that no light could reach. No doubt the flowing contours of the sculpted head, exposed neck and curved bust, caressed by a nocturnal light that seems to emanate imperceptibly from within, amplify the erotic charge of these pictures. But this charge feels to me to have more to do with the desire they arouse and even, impossibly, gratify – to see the other not in her presence but in her absence.

You might have expected the darkness to drain the blood from these figures, to render them abstract, thin, insubstantial. Instead it endows them with a fleshly reality more palpable and more present than any flashgun or ceiling light could hope to achieve. These Laments are exposures, to be sure. They reveal the human as a lamenting being, destined to live with loss and absence ...  Reminding us, in silent defiance of our culture’s tyrannising transparency, that the truest exposure keeps us hidden."

- Josh Cohen, Extract from the Essay 'Invitation to Frequent the Shadows', included in 'Lament' (Art/Books, 2016)