Entry Title: " Aftermath "
Name: Kerry Mansfield, United States
Category: Professional, Self-Portrait


Entry Description: As a photographer, I've spent most of my career looking deeply into the spaces we inhabit and
exploring the idea of Home. But at the age of 31, a diagnosis of breast cancer forced me to redefine my
thinking. Faced with the nihilistic process of radical chemotherapy and surgery, my ideas of where I exist
turned inward. As the treatment broke down the physical structure in which I lived, the relationship between
the cellular self and the metaphysical self became glaringly clear. No one was there when these pictures
were made, just my dissolving ideas of self and a camera.

After getting a degree in photography from UC Berkeley, Kerry studied architecture at California College of the Arts (CCA) before returning to her passion of image making. While her medium of choice is the camera, the spaces created by man-made structures are most often her subject. Combining her two affinities was a natural progression in a seven-year project entitled "Borderline" that explores the boundary between interior and exterior spaces merging in a third plane. In 2005 her "Borderline" series came to a grinding halt due to a diagnosis of Breast Cancer. The battle to recover from the traumas of cancer focused her attentions on the nature of the physical body as a structure. Much like a hurricane ravages the landscape and the places we call home, chemotherapy ravages the body - the most fundamental of "homes". While issues of survival become paramount, the parallels between the structures we live in and the body we live within become startlingly clear. The resulting series, "Aftermath" chronicles that period in a direct and unflinching approach to the destruction and rebirth from the hurricane of Cancer.