- Mirror images
- Photography
Of Darkness and Light
Discovering what lives within
Year: 2020
The most important series I’ve made in recent years is “Of darkness and light”. It was actually the first time I dared to truly turn the camera on myself, and in doing so, I got to know myself better. It was a journey of discovery where I saw sides of myself appear in front of the camera that I had felt were inside me, but had never really seen. Aspects that I was partly afraid of and partly denied were within me.
My emotions are not unfamiliar to me; I know their power in both positive and negative ways. I have personally experienced a burnout and a darker period, I’m an emotionally sensitive person, and I’ve seen my father struggle with severe depression twice in his life.
My, and perhaps our, primary reaction is to look away from these emotions. To store them somewhere inside us and sometimes cover them with a blanket of love. In recent years, and partly through this series, I’ve come to realize that seeing and allowing these emotions is the way that works for me. Acknowledging, sharing, talking about them, and engaging with them myself means that I no longer, or increasingly less often, look away and dare to say: “You are also a part of me”.
But I am not just the darkness; the light also has its place. Thus, the second series was a lighter variant using clay as material to emerge from the egg. This was also the series I had in mind for the longest time. Breaking the clay, feeling the mask fall off is a liberating feeling. Yet, seeing it is sometimes just as strange as seeing your dark sides for the first time.
The final golden series was actually the biggest challenge, because these were the aspects I knew the least. They also turned out to be the most diverse: from the inquisitive to the strong and the imperturbable. These are perhaps the most exciting sides of all for me, and fortunately, I’m getting to know them better and better.
