Today’s special feature is dedicated to the striking and beautifully somber work of Diana Nicholette Jeon, a fine art photographer exploring issues of loss, memory, and dreams. With her varied use of photographic formats and mixed-media techniques, When the Stars Fell From the Sky is a project that guides us through the artist’s most personal journey of resilience and grief. Throughout the images, we encounter an artist exploring her past oeuvre, repurposing it to make sense of a series of turbulent and testing events. Jeon’s images — oneiric, visceral, and unabashedly evocative of our most conflicting emotions — capture the layers and complexities of trauma. As challenging as the path might be, Jeon’s work invites us to steadily overcome it by inviting us to look inward and beyond, even to the watery landscapes of our dreams.
Diana’s website: www.diananicholettejeon.com
Diana’s Instagram: @diananicholettejeon
Diana Nicholette Jeon’s internationally exhibited work explores universal themes of loss, dreams, memory, and female identity via metaphor and personal narrative. Solo exhibitions include the Honolulu Museum of Art (HI), Honolulu Printmakers (HI); Blue SkyGallery (OR); Garage Gallery (NY), 2022 and 2020 HeadOn Photo Festival, Disorder Gallery (Sydney, AU), A Smith Gallery (TX) and Kirsch Gallery (HI). Her work has been recognized in award competitions such as LensCulture, Photolucida’s Critical Mass, the Julia Margaret Cameron awards, and Mira Mobile, and published in a wide variety photography magazines. Jeon’s art is held in public and private collections worldwide, including four works in the permanent collection of the State of Hawai’i. Jeon writes about photography for OneTwelve Publications and FRAMES magazine. She holds an MFA in Imaging and Digital Art from UMBC and resides with her husband and son in Honolulu, HI.
When the Stars Fell From the Sky
In ancient Greek mythology, Acheron was known as the “river of woe,” the “river of pain,” and the “river of lost souls.” The Suda describes the river as “a place of healing…cleansing and purging the sins of humans.” For a season of 860 days, my husband left…me, our son, our home. For 860 days, I felt as if I was sitting on the banks of Acheron, awaiting my healing and my husband’s “return from the underworld.”
We all think we know what we would do when entangled in such a situation, yet the reality is that we have no idea until we are confronted by it. The experience directly affects one’s sense of self, self-confidence, and emotional stability. I was broken; a fragment of myself–I couldn’t even make art. I mourned my marriage and missed my husband while I tried to mitigate the impact on our son. Well-meaning friends told me to “file for divorce” or to “move on and find a new guy.” But I wanted nothing more than to have my family intact once again.
Desperately trying to find the light while riding a rollercoaster that I never got in line for, I was steeped in the palpable unknowability of a new normal that was entirely abnormal, as if a limb had been amputated. I felt utterly alone, that no one understood, that the pain would never stop. There was no beginning, middle, or end. There just was. There were times of shame or deep sadness, interspersed with interludes of peace. Yet I held on tightly to my faith and hopes.
My experience ended with reconciliation, but faint scars remain. Consciously reliving this experience is at once both difficult and cathartic. Yet I feel that by sharing my trauma via this work, others experiencing similar grief may feel less alone in their pain, more able to endure and survive it, and ultimately, may learn–as I did–that they have more strength than they know is possible.
What inspired your journey into photography?
I always liked taking pictures; I used my dad’s Brownie whenever he let me. I always took snapshots of my friends or trips during HS and beyond, but I mainly used a point-and-shoot film camera. Later on, when I returned to school, I immediately fell in love with the darkroom. It was magic. I especially liked the purposeful misuse of process or process alterations to change images’ appearance. I also got my first taste of using Photoshop at that time, and again, it was due to the same power to change images to how I envisioned them rather than how the camera recorded them.
What prompted the creation of your this project?
The series was born out of a dark period when everything I knew as my life had fallen apart.
What have been the biggest challenges working on this project and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenges have been personal. When you work from life experience, you are forced to mentally review the experiences you speak about via the imagery. Psychologists have done research contending that you actually relive the event when you do this. I’ve found that to be true for me. I have to be in a specific mental space to want and be able to go back and relive this particularly debilitating time over and over as I work on the project. It also means the work is slow going. Although it is finished as a series of images, I have been working on making it a book, which I always envisioned from the outset. Getting a combination of three different series merged down to their essence means spending a lot of mental time in that swamp. It is wearying.
The other challenge is that that period was tumultuous and out of my personal control, like riding someone else’s rollercoaster. How do you give a viewer that experience in a book form that translates to them feeling some of the same experience? What fonts express grief and loss of self? How much writing is necessary to make the point vs. allowing the viewer enough space to impart their life experience on the work? I prefer enigma and nuance rather than making my work didactic. Even though I’ve made the images, I’m still working through these issues.
Tell us more about one or more of your selected photographs from this series.
This book project, When the Stars Fell From the Sky, draws upon work from three different series I have made about different aspects of this unexpected life event.
Sinking is a a diptych combining an image I shot on at a beach park in Hilo and a self portrait I made in a resort pool on Maui. Both were made during this grief-filled period, and I feel that in their own way, each image is filled with a sense of loss or desperation. Combining them as a diptych adds to that sense.
Chaos combines an a double-exposure I made of myself screaming with an image I shot in Waipio, Hi. The house had been overtaken by decades of wild plant growth,hence being trapped within it. Together, they spoke to how I felt some days within that dark period.
What drives your continued passion for creating?
My father was a sculptor, I have been around art and museums ever since I can remember. I started making art in early childhood. Being an artist is the essence of who I am as a human. I can no more stop creating than I can stop breathing.
