A sad winter's tale unfolding

This is a personal story, a series of black and white imagery that came into being as part of a larger project in the last couple of years in which the landscape I had been photographed for a period of almost nine years, near my home in rural Western Norway, changed from being the object of my fascination into the object of my personal anxiety and despair. This body of work moves beyond the documentary to explore the possibilities of emotional landscape photography. It is a visual expression of a troubled mind and a yearning heart in which winter appears as the driving force of a nightmarish vision. In this period, one of my children fell seriously ill and I spent many a sleepless night haunted by the worst scenarios. While trying to cope with the torment of uncertainty and distress, my father unexpectedly passed away, and my motherly worries got entangled with an overwhelming feeling of loss and grief. While I always felt very much a part of my natural surroundings, that winter, I could not really connect with the landscape I loved so much. Nevertheless, I kept taking photographs because that is what I do, and because I needed the landscape to be there, as a fixed point in my increasingly obscuring daily life.