Spending countless hours studying cells under the microscope during graduate school initiated Cindy Stokes’ interest in the seen world. Using photography then as a means of recording information, over time outside the lab it became her way to explore ideas, emotion, and story. Cindy’s photography focuses on found objects and spaces with a strong inclination towards abstraction, which feels to her more representative of life’s ambiguity than representative imagery. Cindy has been featured at Leonardo events and Shooting the West and exhibited nationally and internationally. Her interests include handmade and photo books, alternative processes, and the interplay of images in multiples. Cindy resides in Redwood City, CA, and has a studio in San Carlos, CA.
Form and Formless
In isolated details, the photographs in Form and Formless embody the fluidity and solidity of water in all its forms. Free from the distraction of surroundings, in these fragments water becomes abstracted form and formlessness.
While more recognizable images offer grounding, the strangeness of others invites personal interpretations within the uncertainty. For me the series embodies my feelings in that place between waking and sleep, where my thoughts flow unimpeded, the real and imagined mixing freely and new ideas tumbling forth, usually to be forgotten when I fully wake up. In that space I relive, reimagine, and reinvent my reality, just as water endlessly transmutes its own presentation.
To view more of Cindy’s work please visit her website.