Dark Places

The project is about finding nocturnal places, connecting them with the inner landscapes of feelings and revealing them in the unseen, yet real light. The artist conducts intuitive wanderings through the untamed scenery of the country of the Aborigines.

As I try to come to terms with the sad culture of exploiting animals and the heartless colonisation of our natural environment, I seek out solace in spending time outside at night and working in the darkness. I set out to explore the night-time existence of the landscape and the randomly-encountered beings and creatures in it.

The lonely wandering through space amplifies my sense of perception, sharpening the senses as I switch to an intuitive and instinctual level. I am like a hunter waiting for a movement, for the ideal composition, for an interesting shape or flash of light that suddenly appears in the darkness. I never know what the photographs will look like exactly. I never see clearly.

I am on a discovery of what the world might look like if we could see in the dark. My desire is to give a new meaning to the landscape and a new visibility to invisible natural phenomena. In doing so, the newly found richness and complexity of this universe of life allows me to marvel breathlessly at the show that nature is giving us, while anxiously realising that one day, this unique place will no longer be.

At the same time, and perhaps more subconsciously than consciously, I record my experience as a wanderer, uprooted from my original family and cultural experience, but all the closer to my own human essence of being. In this magical reality, I work with the subject’s image as a visual and energetic trace, a personal aura, trying to blend in or merge with the landscape or, on the contrary, to emerge from the darkness – to understand our inner setting, our future direction, our path and identity, our primal essence.

The outcome is a strong tension between the photographer and the subject, but also a linking up. The resulting images are experimental, physically inaccurate records, but thanks to the passage of night time they reveal what lies beneath the surface – somewhere deep within us, in the Dark Places most of us are afraid to look.