The sun is the one energy source that links all life. Since the dawn of time, Earth’s civilizations have variously paid homage to the sun as the symbol of wisdom, compassion and enlightenment. It’s the healer of physical and spiritual maladies, and the fundamental source of fertility, growth, and renewal.

(Work in progress)

My interest in perception of time got a very literal output in the series Game of Badminton. The installation consists of 20 photographs depicting a badminton shuttlecock in play during a game. When photographed, the shuttle-cock is in motion, but with the cameras ability of short shutter speed this motion is killed/frozen.

Gathering all the photographs in the same room, enables a possibility for the viewer to look both back and forward in time. A sense of being in a frozen time period (the period of a badminton game) is constructed. This is further enhanced by the hanging of the photographs. The room and space of a badminton field is recreated by letting the hanging be determined by where the picture was taken in the original space.

For the visual identity of the exhibition (showed at Galleri Monitor 2016) I worked with graphic designer Tor Weibull, who talks about his part here.

In my second post I’ve decided to show some of the material which sparked the ideas behind the series Static Motion that I presented yesterday. It all began after flipping through a 1950s instruction book of table tennis (How to play Table Tennis by Jack Kerrington). The book instructs through both texts and photographs on how to play table tennis in a proper way. How to move your arm and body and how to perform the strokes. Frequently series of photographs was used, showing the stroke being performed step by step. Probably since a single picture was found deficient of showing the whole movement. I started collecting other sport manuals and soon found similarities in how photography had been used. The body motions instructed was clarified and enhanced through additional symbols; arrows, lines, crosses and circles. The single photograph is not enough in itself for this task. These illustrations have been added to the photographs afterwards to indicate directions of motion, explaining what had happened before and after the captured moment. This is often seen as one of the photographic mediums strengths (the decisive moment), but in this case the capturing of a moment becomes its limitation.

The series Static Motion is built around a paradox. Photography being a static medium, makes it restricted in depicting actual motion. The motion that the viewer might see in a photograph is all happening in their head. Photography’s ability to freeze a motion is an advantage when for example studying the galloping of a horse. (The Horse in motion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1878). However, photography’s inevitable freezing characteristics, as opposed to video, becomes a problem when the visualization of movement is the primary goal. In the series I’ve played with this limitation of the photographic medium. Is it possible to visualize motion using a static medium?