blooming in blue
Leah Bury and Angélica Rahe · Austin, Texas, 2026
Blooming in Blue is a collaborative cyanotype series by photographer and interdisciplinary artist Leah Bury and multidisciplinary artist Angélica Rahe. The work grew from conversations between the two artists around feminine essence, reinvention, cycles, cocoons, and metamorphosis, and from a shared inquiry into the ways identity shifts across time, relationship, and lived experience.
Layering portraits of Angélica with landscapes, botanical forms, handwritten text, and repeated exposures, the images explore the porous boundaries between body and environment. Faces hold other faces. Flora passes through skin. Landscapes enter the body. Human and more-than-human forms overlap, approaching identity as something continually shaped through contact with memory, place, and the many selves carried across a life.
The natural world offers a rhythm for this inquiry. Transformation unfolds through cycles of emergence, decay, dormancy, shedding, and return. The self participates in these same rhythms, continually dissolving and reforming through relationship.
The medium of cyanotype is integral to the work. The process depends on light, water, chemistry, time, and conditions that can be guided but never fully controlled. Blue becomes a space of passage, where matter interacts and new forms emerge.
