The Glossing Hume Bathes of Domino Leaha

'Les onze mille verges' (The eleven thousand yards), Guillaume Apollinaire

Words Brit Parks

Gloom hollows betraying sink holes of colour strewn like time racing for the wire of her raw crime. Passion dosing a high-lived sultry emphasis of depth born secret codes on paper scraps, hand bent 'I love yous' crawling up your spine. Blue rainless skies of her sheer consumption of life breath. A lithe master mixing celluloid with sea water for her morning song. The cement of tomorrow is not in the frame of inhabitable light glazing the faces she drinks in and puffs out as relics. A silent longing known, scripted in tongues, traded for a mythical still blur of hope, collared.

Brit Parks: Your images capture a rare form of vulnerability, why does that concept feel pressing to you?

Domino Leaha: I'm a vulnerable person myself…I'm very dramatic...I want everything to seem like we are in movie.

Images unfold in my mind easily, like movie scenes. To dream and be free in the world for a second, I can be away from reality.

BP: Can you speak to your relationship with colour in your images?

DL: I'm obsessed with colours, lights, shadows, and reflections. Colours and form speak to a primal part of my body.

Similar to the butterflies feeling of falling in love, it's an indescribable motivation and purely instinctual. I am attracted to light and color in abstract form.

BP: How do you achieve the intensity felt in relation to your subjects?

DL: Just living the moment with them. 

All of my subjects are different and each has a different story. 

I always fall halfway in love with them. Each encounter is real and raw.

BP: Why were the words from your subjects important to include as part of your book?

DL: I think it's nice to give them a way to tell their feelings and their truth and experiences with me...Good or bad.

We were all together once, loving each other, kissing each other, screaming to each other, playing  together. I felt that it was right to give them the freedom to express themselves.

For me it was very important to be able to ask them how they really felt.  

BP: What influences your approach to your work, such as other artists, music, poetry?

Fante and Bukowski - Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller - Ginsberg - Kerouac - Cassidy - Rimbaud - Baudelaire - D.H. Lawrence - Man Ray - Duchamp - Leonora Carrington - Andre Breton - Picasso - Giacometti -Francis Bacon - Egon Schiele - Munch - Klimt - Henry Moore - Dylan Thomas - Patti Smith - Robert Mapplethorpe - Bob Dylan - The Doors - David Bowie - Led Zeppelin

I'm inspired by people's relationships to making art while being able to support each other. All of the stories I love revolve around support. I don't think everyone knows what it means honestly…probably not all the people I know really understand.

My book title, UNFULFILLED, is inspired by a Shakespeare sonnet. I was reading his sonnet at a time I was broken hearted.

BP: There is a certain restlessness of spirit in some images, do you feel that as the artist.

DL: It goes in a moment…we are all broken in a way…deny it or not, life is hard.

Sometimes it's good to be sad and to be open to it. 

The most beautiful photos I took were when I was destroyed inside for some reason. 

It made me inspired. 

You can buy Domino Leaha's new book 'UNFULFILLED' here

Book launch, January 22, 6-8 PM

des pair books
1543 Echo Park
Los Angeles    

All images courtesy of domino leaha @domino_leaha