As having grown up in Scandinavia my relationship to nature is a close and strong one, based on a mixture of deep respect and fear. The sea, mountains and woods in the North are wild, dark and seem unending. You can easily get lost. Nature is the powerful one; human being must find a balance and submit. Or is that a romantic Scandinavian approach?

Nature in the Netherlands, where I have been living the last 20 years, is extremely cultivated. The balance is turned around. Here nature is made to submit to human being – land reclaimed from the sea, trees planted in straight lines, the sea controlled by sophisticated dyke systems and so on. Human being is in control. Or so it seems at the first glimpse.

 

My photographic work evolves around the relationship between humankind and nature, and our existence in it. The longing towards a natural wilderness, which might have disappeared in the human obsession with controlling and cultivating all living around him. Nature has been turned into a theater set, where plants and trees have become props, and the human figure, the director of the stage.

 

It questions the notions of identity, the human condition and the cycle of all living.

 

The final work is photographic, but it has as well reference to figurative painting, performance and sculpture.