“Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.” -Rumi
MANGANESE, 2019, film photography, sizes variable. The film exposures from beneath a budding tree in spring are cast in a light reminiscent of the mineral Manganese. The element related to the metabolic processes within the human body are also used in manufacturing to prevent corrosion. The images aesthetically work to create reverence with the relationship humans have with nature. In high concentrations, Manganese is lethal, and in deficits cause great pain.
As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just, Beauty offers experiences leading to resolutions of inner turmoil. The balance of energy, motivation, and resources for a tree to grow also follows in traditions of seekers and sages of wisdom.
AMBER (CHASMAL), 2019, photography. As a substance used in ancient folk medicine, Amber (Chasmal), was understood as electrical conductor. Accumulated sap hardened over time was used to protect the body from harmful energies and revive benevolent energies from the heart and circulatory system. These material properties are mirrored in the reflexivity of both photographic process and resulting images, in the presentation, the images refer to the images themselves more than the subject being referred to. This cause and effect relationship aims to foster a structure that can be benevolent for the viewer.
SURREAL LANDSCAPE, 2016-2019, film photography. Surreal Landscape uses the medium of photography to look at vision as a way human understanding differs from artificial intelligence. The vision of elements presented in the series are sensual and textural. The materiality of imaging the abstractions of elements becomes mirrored in the psyche, and embodied perception through the physicality of spacial viewing. The images are framed for the physicality of form in union with the perceptual state of mind to extract new forms from “mental turbulence.” As Davinci depicted turbulence in water and in the mind in paint, illuminating perceptual turbulence. Such methods in painting are translated into the contemporaneity of the photographic process. The ability to extract form from turbulence becomes the ability to invent new form in visual art history. Artificial intelligence cannot do this as samples must be referenced. The difference is so slight, the self-evident truth is most often missed. As challenging for humans to gain direct experiences presents a challenge, particularly for technocrats. The aesthetic relationships stir ethical conversations on relationships between humans and nature. Using the distinct qualities of imaging technology by enhancing the digital interpretations of analogue film, the photographic image invites the viewer to open various methods in which vision and images can be read, related with, and understood. Values of beauty and internal and external landscapes, as principles, guide emotional and behavioural choices related to the environment of which humans are made of.
SOMME, film photography, 2019, sizes variable. Somme is a place in France of a gruesome battle, noted for unnamed victors. Without clear winners, a site of indeterminacy offers a series of visual metaphors into the process of understanding nature.By attuning the senses to an ontological memory, the histories of a place can be felt through they body. The framing action in the apparatus of photography invites hypnogogic viewing of the elementals within nature. As virtual impressions (images), the photographs visualise spectrums of feeling through landscape forms.Beauty and brutality, finite and unrelenting, pain and reprieve, are represented in as chromatic windows into relentless changes in the ways life, seasons, and societies, build and fall.
MOUVEMENTS (BEVEGELSENE), 2015-2018, photography, variable sizes. Exhibitions at Vérité and Akers Mek in Oslo, Norway, 100 x 140 cm, Epson Archival Ink, mounted on kapa.
The Mouvements series reveals nuanced details in digital imaging technology. The images are informed by tensions in oil and water as resources. The materiality of digital imaging technology, distance in viewing, and surreal representations in water forms are highlighted by minuscule film grains amplified after film scanning. The epistemology of water or way we come to learn and understand what water, is an ongoing endeavour. To then know what we are doing with technology, requires extended looking. The way something appears can obfuscate and reveal our relationship to the looking. Oil and water become elemental allegory for technocratic times. As Umberto Eco writes in several books on late modernity, images are read and our connections and relations are realised as a malleable surfaces. The natural beauty of the water is transformed by a hypnotic colour palette tied to screen technology. Viewing distances engage viewers in a sense of movement in stillness.
RUISSEAU (HOLOCENE), 2018, film photography, 68,14 x 101,6 cm (26,8 x 40 in). Ruisseau Holocene is a reflection on how we perceive time and nature. The residue deposited over time in the sands of the Lofoten islands, in the North of Norway, creates endless streams of changing formations.
SENTIRE (GROW), 2017, film photography. Artist note; while I cannot ingest the plant in any capacity, I approach this series with curiosity. There was so much wonder on many levels; the actual labor involved in modern growing practices is full of technology, offering the grower refined nuance in selecting the biological expressions and usage effects. I had often wondered on all the terrible things humans are capable of, why a plant rendering the user inert (in a sense) to the external world, but (as I understand) somehow more in touch with the interior connection with the natural world, could have been criminalised. The decriminalisation of this plant is viewed as a triumph for many people and places, yet has remained a taboo subject and remains illegal in Norway. Photographing these plants led to developing a Poisonous Plants concept over several years; more on a different page, later.
