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 an ongoing photographic project initiated in 2019 after the birth of my daughter and our move from Copenhagen to a small fishing village in southern Denmark. The work emerges from the intersection of early parenthood and a life lived in close proximity to raw coastal nature, where domestic space and landscape continuously inform one another.

Through portraits of my family and images of the surrounding environment — sea, storms, forests, and shifting tides — the project investigates parallel cycles of transformation in the human body and the natural world. The isolated setting functions as a stage for examining vulnerability, intimacy, and belonging, while questioning how identity is shaped by place. The photographs move between closeness and distance, tenderness and exposure, constructing a visual language that reflects the instability and fluidity of lived experience.

Although rooted in personal narrative, the project engages wider concerns about ecological fragility and impermanence. The landscapes depicted carry visible traces of environmental strain, including soil depletion, industrial fish farming, and rising sea levels. These elements are embedded in the work as part of everyday reality rather than overt commentary, suggesting that the precarity of family life is inseparable from the condition of the environment that sustains it.

The title The Dancing Forest evokes a system of interdependence: a family, like a forest, exists through constant exchange with its surroundings. The selected images form a non-linear sequence that mirrors the rhythms of memory and seasonal change, oscillating between moments of intimacy and broader environmental views. Together, they propose a meditation on coexistence — between generations, between humans and nature, and between stability and transformation.