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Cancelled → Cosmos 

From Shadow to Signal, From Cancellation to Cosmos.

My work inhabits the ache of rupture yet insists on emergence, tracing fragile thresholds where silence opens into resilience and fracture becomes possibility.

My work begins with rupture; with the moment something falls away, a connection frays, or the center no longer holds. I photograph from inside that space. Not to fix it. Not to solve it. But to sit with it. To witness it.

My camera becomes a witness to the fragile, the aching, and the unresolved. I am not looking for beauty in the broken; I am searching for the truth that pulses underneath it.

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Part I - Canceld

My current work, Canceld, lives in that space. Not the silence of being misunderstood, but the ache of being pushed away. It’s about the quiet violence of exclusion - the moments when communication fails to honor who someone truly is. It’s about being left without explanation, treated as if one no longer matters, or never did. It’s about the rupture that comes when respect is withdrawn - not always shouted, but often felt in what goes unsaid.

This work speaks to those moments between lovers, between parents and children, between friends and strangers - when one person shoves another into shadow. And it looks honestly, too, at the times we’ve been the ones doing the pushing. Canceld exists in the shared tension of those fractures, the echo between being shut out and shutting down.

Loneliness threads through these images like a low frequency, nearly invisible yet universally felt. Pillows left cold, chairs turned away, figures wrapped and withdrawn - each a notation of absence. These figures are me; each one is self-portraiture, my own body marked, veiled, and offered as witness to rupture. In one image, a cross of light is cast as shadow on my chest, in another, an X emerges across the same surface. Even when absent, my presence lingers in objects left behind. The sunflower turns, yet resists connection, mirroring fracture and tension.

Loneliness has been named a global epidemic, and in Denmark, where I live, isolation is quietly deepening. My work does not aim to resolve this wound, but to hold it open long enough for us to recognize its shape.

In these images, motifs return and transform: two sunflowers turned away from each other, caught in rupture and distance and later the lone sunflower that persists, turning to the light even from within shadow.

The bat appears as well; its wings echoing the sunflower’s petals, yet reaching into darkness instead of light.

One orients by the sun, the other by inner sensing.

Together, they foreshadow the arc ahead: a movement from fracture into a wider field, where even what seems opposed can touch.

In a world that cancels quickly and heals slowly, I am interested in holding space for what lingers; for the ache that resists erasure, the silence that still vibrates, the absence that refuses to be empty, in what isn’t said. In what can still be seen.

 

Part II - What Is Empty Is Also Ready: Vessel for dawn

From this intimate rupture, the work moves across thresholds of readiness and emergence. The wrapped figure loosens; the body begins to breathe.

This quieter passage holds space for emptiness as potential.
The bowl appears both hollow and receptive, absence and readiness.

What Is Empty Is Also Ready.

The passionfruit, seeded and hidden, suggests fertility not yet visible.
These elemental symbols remind us that emptiness can also prepare the ground for renewal.

 

Part III – Dreamscapes / Machines / Escape / Thresholds

From holding, the work moves into dreamscapes where machines and stairways dissolve into surreal architectures of escape. Here, the ordinary (a moped, a stairwell, a motorcycle) becomes mythic. Machines hover weightless, tracing movement, desire, risk, and crossing personal and geographical borders. These images inhabit the liminal; between ascent and collapse, between rootedness and flight.

At the core of this section is I Ride What I Already Know and What I Dare to Learn, a large-scale silkscreen collage where ascent, fracture, and journey converge. Fragments of sunflower petals scatter across stairs that rise endlessly, intersected by motorbikes and mopeds echoing Easy Rider’s odyssey into a divided America, then and now.

An upside-down U.S. flag signals distress, a nation split, mirroring both a fractured world and my own split between geographies: Denmark as roots, California as family.

The piece honors the Pop Art lineage of Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Jasper Johns, whose symbolic deconstructions of flags and maps have shaped generations, and whose name I also passed on to my son.

By cutting the canvas in two, the work embeds rupture in its very form, while a nine-part collage reassembles fragments into a fractured whole, pointing to resilience in the act of making.

Here, vehicles, flags, and thresholds become both literal and metaphoric; journeys between states of mind, between worlds in dialogue, between what is known and what dares to be discovered.

 

Part IV - Cosmos

The work expands into nocturnal and cosmic thresholds. Petals and bat wings merge, sunflower and bat overlapping in form and resonance. One born of sunlight, the other of shadow, together they embody the paradox of emergence; that resilience is nourished not only by clarity, but also by darkness.

A star falls like fire; the moon turns red. These images mark stepping into one’s own signal; unhidden, unfiltered, rising. The bat teaches trust in senses beyond sight, the shooting star sparks blessing, the eclipse signals shadow work complete, cycle closed, threshold crossed.

These cosmic thresholds carry the work into a mythic register.

 

Across these passages, the work traces a journey from intimate heartache to universal resonance. What begins as rupture expands into a wider cosmos, where what was silenced rises as signal, where the lonely becomes luminous. The series is not a promise of healing but a map of thresholds, where fracture becomes opening, and where what breaks open does not end, but expands outward.What is empty now opens wide for what must come; a vessel for dawn, a space for the unseen, a signal rising into light.

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All images copyright © Le Pels