‘The Verity Project’ represents my embrace of ephemerality and presence through photography. With my hand-built lens, I construct novel abstract environments, by transforming ordinary items into tabletop miniature landscape photographs. My images manifest our innermost states of being, while exploring our relationship with Nature.

My photographic work highlights the material and physical possibilities of image making. I transmute ordinary items into new environments, via a three-step process. I gather fallen horticultural items and small household objects, and assemble them with my hand-engraved drawings and collages. Then, I infuse water and a combination of inks into these designed arrangements. Finally, I photograph the compositions through my unique hand-built lens, creating still life landscapes. As the square is symbolic of the earth, all of my photographs use the 1:1 aspect ratio.

My hand-constructed environments manifest the beauty and physicality of small items often deemed prosaic or disposable: fallen botanicals, kitchen tools, textile or paper fragments, hand-felted dryer lint, feline fur brushings, and other mundane objects. No editing, filtering, nor post-capture alteration are used in my work.

My images represent a natural marriage of art and science. By utilizing the optics of my handmade lens, these photographs provide an inherent sense of anamorphism. These innovative still life images offer a cognitive impression of movement, texture and volume, as if possessing a third and fourth dimension. They challenge our collective perception and experience of reality.

Offering a new sense of place and form, my unpeopled abstract landscapes propose a reemergent connection with Nature. By building reimagined environments, these photographs reveal an expansive sensitivity to our escalating climate crisis, the vulnerability of our landscape, and the legacy of healing offered within. Foregrounding an exploration of memory and wonder that is both internal and naturally derived, my work redefines the boundaries of contemporary photography.

Judith Rayl is driven by creative expression of the complex simultaneity of human awareness. Her artwork discloses the transformative capabilities of the natural world. Judith was raised immersed in the deep vulnerabilities of ethnic bias and generational trauma. She is a physician and stroke survivor who conveys the necessity of art as a vehicle to express both grief and solace. Her artwork has been chosen for numerous exhibitions and honors. Recently, Judith was selected as a Bloedel Reserve Community Creative for 2025, and won the Tuŝis IV International Fine Art Photography Contest. Other awards include Seattle’s Ethnic Artist Roster, Artists Up Mentoring Scholarship, two Arts & Humanities Bainbridge Grants and Cultural Arts Foundation NW Grant. Judith’s work has been featured in publications with international reach.

For more information:
Visit: www.judithrayl.com
Read the interview with Judith Rayl