Beneath life is silence

Beneath Life is Silence is a collection created during my period as artist-in-residence at Halsnoy Abbey in Norway. It was inspired by The Boat in the Evening, a book by Tarjei Vesaas, and my immediate response to his world and hid relationship with nature. I am drawn to the concept of transition, which he explores throughout his work, the passage between good and evil, shadow and light, water and earth. His writing translates the comings and goings of the mind as it meanders, the oscillation between mist and brightness, reality and dreams. This is how he builds ice cathedrals, where silence echoes and where time is suspended between life and death. These are all notions which reflect the themes which interest me: his strong relationship with the material world, his strange, pure characters, always slightly distanced from the rest of humanity. They can see beyond appearances, enveloped in the silence which allows them to retreat into themselves, as if they had gone to seek out private worlds, but on journeys where the idea of transition and sudden change is always present. Those moments where things are no longer as they were and become other, when dreams are sometimes stronger than reality. It is this passage from the concrete to the abstract which I try to capture in my work, by blurring the boundaries between photography and painting. Entering the world of Tarjei Vesaas, a world of earth and water, ice and forests, snow and mist, is, as the writer himself says ‘not to understand but to be near what is happening’.