to wear someone else’s skin.

to not have a body.

to be empty.

In my previous post I was writing about different shapes and how they are appearing and disappearing in my work. Humans who turn into animals and become other. Creatures who are born out of flesh or different materials, going elsewhere. I always had this fascination for characters of different myths. And therefore what it means to believe in their existence and how I can trigger this memory of uneasiness or repulsion from the stories in my photography. I take fragments like the long nails or hair from Struwwelpeter, or the idea of the eye in the sandman as inspiration and reconstruct them in my images. For me photography is not a way of documenting something or telling a story. It is rather about creating a feeling or a taste of something that I hope, will stay with you and make you think of your own body and the relationship to others.

In one of my images above, you can see a tree, which almost looks like a big growing mushroom. I am intrigued by the colours and shapes because I cannot tell what it is or where such a thing could exist. I made this print from a glass negative, which I found recently in one of the vintage shops in Brighton. The tree looks like it was constructed with expanding foam and painted with different layers, making the photograph disappear. It is also interesting how you can see the camera in the background. Someone must have taken a picture from the other side. I imagine me standing there. It could be something I would photograph or make.

We find ourselves in an imaginative world, a space which seems impossible to enter. Similar to my images, where it can be difficult to find a way in. I use fragments of the everyday; transform them through size or material of the print. Hence it becomes more of a bodily experience similar to the one of printing large in the darkroom. Seeing the photograph projected in life size onto the board, gives me a strange feeling of someone else’s presence. Seeing and creating is an act of becoming: different constellations are being born, moving from one to the other. Hesitation sometimes stops me, in stopping, make me wonder, and then stare into emptiness, such divine emptiness.

“Off bodies changed to other forms I tell;

You God`s, who have yourselves wrought every change,

Inspire my enterprise and lead my lay.

In one continuous song from nature’s first

Remote beginnings to our modern times…

Of nature was the same, all one, well named,

Chaos: a raw and undivided mass.

And the bright constellations; in the sea.

He set the shinning fish to swim; the land received the beasts, the gusty air, the birds.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses.)