The Navel of the Dream

In “The Navel of the Dream” I aim to communicate a state of groundlessness. These images document my shifting relationship to notions of homeland, change and transformation. They were made in Southern Sweden, and New England between 2023 and 2025.

My images in “The Navel of the Dream” describe a state of groundlessness. In this body of work photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and between memories and myths. 

In my night images, light divides the world in half. We can’t see past the boundaries of the flash. The gravity of shadows becomes an experience of density, a space that holds secrets and monsters. In a white Sankta Lucia gown, I burn through the black, obsidian night. In the daytime, light breaks the world open. Light, in these images, illuminates the boundaries of what is known.

What happens after a rupture?  What is remade and what is undone? Where does the dust settle? What lies in the wake of that which washes along the shore? Everything is different and I am responding to the shifting tide and searching for a place to stand. As I make the image, the image in turn makes me. I use photography to reenact the mythos of childhood, and the deep waters of my subconscious.

I am engaged in investigating the capacity of photographs to depict absence and to externalize internal topographies of grief and reckoning. How does one communicate distance in a medium that is predicated on proximity and transparency? By investing landscapes with metaphor and correlating the emotional terrain with the peculiarities and mythologies of the land, I aim to charge my photographs with undercurrents of loss and longing.

I am defined by the polarity of the two countries of my origin, as well as the binaries of city and country, the English and Swedish languages, mountains and plateaus, forests and placid grain fields, poetry and photography. In this project I have photographed the southern Swedish landscape while reflecting on themes of fracture, regrowth, and emergence. The terms of connection here are indelible and fragile and make vivid what is highly suggestive in my imagination.

I am interested in using myth to look sideways at the truth. My images are simultaneously myth-making, and truth-seeking and I am actively attempting to define, and locate myself within their periphery.