Grove

Trying to conquer the elusive feeling of hidden danger among the trees from my childhood memories, I make film photograms outdoors at night in the forest were I used to play while growing up. Focusing on a world without language I want to capture the experience shared between the child and the wild beast where the world is understood literally through the senses. By hanging the film from the trees´ branches at night, the light and shadow of the forest is caught in a way that places the viewer on the other side of the trees, immersed in the natural world. The film itself is materially marked by its outdoors experience, resulting in prints that also carry impressions of the foggy moist air and scratches and tears from the branches. By this process the film ends up as a sampling tool, dipped and left to soak in the unadulterated darkness of the natural night. Facing the images we get to see Mother Nature caught by a maelstrom of photons, rearing up on her hind legs looking back at us with a defiant stare. Working without a camera and in a way giving the landscape a release cord, I end up capturing the essence of the primordial forest as a sensory experience on film. At the same time the series has a scientific angle, in the way the pictures are made and displayed. By collecting the images as samples of varying sizes, to be sorted and categorized, the process of creating visual order and understanding is underlined, while the visible chemical recordings of physical processes going on independently of the interpreting observer shows us the seething breeding ground of our inner phantasms. The contactprints display the whole sheets of film, uncut and ready for inspection as scientifc collections taken from the natural world. As contactprints they are true to life size and virtually without filmgrain. The Norwegian forest is defined by the European Spruce and focusing on this species the images are sorted into groups by the varying size of the sampled subjects.