Rat Typology (2021)
This body of work emerged during a period marked by intense psychological strain and social withdrawal. My movements through the city—via alleys, on a skateboard, through scavenged space, dumpster diving—reflected a state of anxious dislocation. The rat, as subject, became a site of projection: not a figure of affection, but of identification. Reviled, furtive, and adaptive, rats mirrored my own experience of marginality and invisible persistence. Created amid personal upheaval and broader public isolation (notably during the masked COVID period), these photographs operate as both urban wildlife documentation and oblique self-portraiture. They investigate survival within neglected infrastructures, and the emotional textures of precarity, alienation, and hypervigilance. The work situates the rat as a symbol of endurance on the periphery—dwelling in the shadows of the city and the psyche alike. In their tense, discreet movements, I recognized a form of being that paralleled my own: uneasy, unseen, and ongoing.