“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — C.G. Jung
Curiosity first led me here. As a teenager I discovered Jung’s Man and His Symbols and began keeping a dream journal — half-fascinated, half-bewildered by the idea that the unconscious might be trying to speak. Those early notes were my first attempts to listen.
Decades later, revisiting my old diaries, I felt that same stir of recognition. The boy who asked “why?” was still alive in the margins — curious, questioning, impatient for meaning. I realised that shadow work isn’t a new pursuit but a continuation of that conversation I began long ago.
Today that dialogue continues through art, writing, and the strange intimacy of digital self-portraiture. In printmaking I carve what words can’t hold; in my Fifty Years On project I meet the selves I once was; in my AI model “JV” I encounter a mirror — the persona I project and the shadow that looks back.
Shadow work, for me, is the act of turning toward what was left unfinished — to retrieve the unlived and unspoken, to give it form again, and in doing so, to become a little more whole.
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