I am a danish artist educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (MA in art theory and communication) and at Art history.
For more than a decade I lived without neighbours close to the forest. Nature is a very wise teacher and working with photography gave me the great privilege to spend a lot out of time outdoor. This is where my heart lies and did ever since childhood. In my work I search for the meditative, the kind of in-between spaces revealing the magic that silently unfolds in the natural world all around us.
In a shamanic worldview, everything is connected and every single part in the universe reflects the cosmic web. This is the most ancient and intuitive knowledge of mankind. It is the impulse from the Great Unknown – the quantum processes of matter and consciousness unfolding in modern science.
In this infinite web life itself is sacred, and in almost every culture we find the myth of the sacred tree of life and local tales about sacred water, rocks and trees as powerful protectors and guardian spirits.
Trees change their character especially after dark. When society slows down and people go to rest, nature is undisturbed by human activity. Trees transform– as we transform into dreamstate. They silently step forward in the night as strange and most amazing old beings – as ancient spirits with knowledge of the past and the wisdom of growth as key to our future.
Today much of human action and our civilisation contradict the natural balance of the earth with imbalances and chaos as a result. Unlike so many of the indigenous cultures that still practice dream work, ritual, and thanksgiving, Western culture seems to have forgotten what man originally knew of the invisible realms and the importance of spiritual guidance.
Every hunt and every harvest, every birth and every death was marked with a ceremony – and each time the old stories were passed on, they were an important reminder of our journey between life and death.
The original myths are not just about people. They are about creation and a marvellous and sacred world of the strangest and most magnificent beings. Not just animals and humans, but also trees, plants, rocks and the life-giving water. Every living being on this planet has its own and completely unique kinship with the mystery of life and a sense of belonging to the earth. It is by no means something abstract; it is the bond that stretches in a long genetic chain to all our relatives, who walked the earth in an unbroken chain before us.
Lotte Tauber Lassen, 2021.
