The Dancing Forest

The Dancing Forest is a visual journey into resilience and belonging, weaving portraits and landscapes that explore womanhood, memory, and the fragile balance between intimacy and survival.

The Dancing Forest is a long-term artistic project that began in 2019, following the birth of our daughter and our move from Copenhagen to a small fishing village in southern Denmark. In this remote place, the beginning of parenthood merged with life close to nature and gave rise to a new way of seeing.

The raw surroundings — the sea, the storms, the tides and forests — became mirrors for transformations of the body, intimacy, and family life. Through photography, I explore cycles of change in both humans and nature, using the isolated setting as a stage to reflect on vulnerability, belonging, and the fragile balance of existence.

The work is both personal and universal: a family record that resonates with broader questions of climate change, survival, and impermanence. It is shaped not as a linear chronology but as a flow of consciousness — shifting like relationships, seasons, and memory itself.

The title, The Dancing Forest, embodies this vision. A family, like a forest, exists through interconnection with the surrounding world. It is “dancing” because neither time nor relationships are static: they shift, transform, and float within the currents of time and space. The project reflects the dramatic changes and contradictions inherent in the act of living: love and fear, protection and freedom, life and death. It is a call to recognise the vulnerability of existence, and at the same time, the integrity of simply being.

At the same time, The Dancing Forest unfolds against the backdrop of climate change and environmental strain. The landscapes I photograph bear the marks of soil depletion, industrial fish farming, and rising sea levels. These elements remain quietly present in the work, not as political slogans but as part of the lived reality of rural and island life — a reminder that the fragility of family existence cannot be separated from the fragility of the environment that sustains it.

With the support of this working grant, I wish to continue developing The Dancing Forest in both its photographic and narrative layers. I will expand the project through new portraits, landscapes, and writings, while experimenting with installations that merge image, text, and space. The grant will allow me to dedicate concentrated time to deepen the work, refine its form, and prepare it for future exhibitions and publication.