I have been thinking about the word auteur.
It is French for "author," but it means more than someone who writes books. An auteur is the creative consciousness behind an entire world. Their vision can be felt through its imagery, atmosphere, stories, sound, symbolism, and style.
The word speaks to me because I am not simply creating individual photographs, masks, essays, rituals, or sounds. They all belong to the same unfolding realm. Each one is a different doorway into the world of Madame Skadu and into my enquiry about who and what I am.
I am not playing a character created by somebody else. I am writing her mythology, shaping her image, creating her surroundings, choosing her language, and discovering her through my own body and lived experience. I am the woman within the frame as well as the consciousness behind it.
To call myself an auteur is to claim authorship of my creative expression and, ultimately, of my own life. It means gathering its scattered fragments—beauty, suffering, desire, darkness, devotion, dominance, surrender, memory, and imagination—and allowing them to speak to one another.
My life does not need to be directed by the expectations of other people. I decide where the light falls, how the image is composed, which stories I tell, and what I keep for myself until it is ready to be seen.
Being an auteur does not mean that I have everything planned or know how the story ends. My creative practise is an enquiry. Its meaning becomes clearer as I give it form, although it may also change direction, resist me, surprise me, or lead me somewhere I never expected to go.
Madame Skadu is not another person I have invented. She is a way of entering more deeply into my own existence, with my hands on the camera, my body in the frame, and the story still taking shape around me.