Hovering between illusion and object, the Relief series links the photographic process to the much older deeply human history of mark-making.

Distressing the photograph may violate the representational spirit of photography but it also opens up our visual world to new interpretations, to one of spatial irresolution.

Using a natural landscape, or formal portrait from her photo shoots as a point of departure, the meaning of the original image becomes something new.

Cutting, bending, carving, blasting, shooting, burning, and painting on and into the paper turn the photographs into 3D objects. It’s a conflation of photography with painting and reliefs.

The Sumerians were the first to make reliefs. They used stelae to sculpt onto a standing stone to celebrate rulers, gods, and achievements. In this series, intervening with light traces, scans, acrylic paint, and handmade markings on top of the print is a way to commemorate our daily world beyond the visible truth.

Each hand-made print creates collisions between fullness and emptiness, sky and ground, matter and void. Through the holes, perforations and bumps, there is an interplay of order & precision and chaos & disintegration. The tension in the series comes from the beauty of the landscapes & portraits — and the damage inflicted upon it by the artist.

Relief is a body of work that explores what a photograph can actually be through manipulating the surface. Soren once again creates blind spots on her photograph which questions human beings ability to see clearly. The surface marks stand in for the psychological states that block anyone’s ability to move through the world with certainty.

—Resurrection, detail of relief