The Navel of the Dream

'The Navel of the Dream' describes 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.

As a child, I constructed whole worlds from the top of the cherry tree in our backyard where no one else dared to climb. Perched on high branches that swayed in the wind, I picked and ate the ripest cherries while I watched the fields undulating bellow; a rippling ocean of barley, still green and not quite ready for harvest, their bristle-like sheaths, moved like a golden liquid in the wind, forming tide pools and eddies in the grass. 

Here, I am a faceless figure with sticky palms, gripping the craggy bark of the cherry tree. My knuckles whiten as I cling to its branches. In the dark, the flash and the obscured visage of the figure make the image unsettling. It is incomplete - something half there. The spiny tree reaching wildly into oblivion is a ship in the night, a mast or a mooring for the untethered figure. A rich reddish amber sap pools and runs down the tree in the harsh white light. One summer my father had sent me up the tree with a paring knife and a glass jar to dig nodules of the hardened, syrupy resin out of the branches. It oozed like blood from the bark’s gnarly crevasses and the residue clung to my fingers for days afterwards. 

What is between me and the performance, what is that thing? Usually it is sadness. In this composition, the tree is more self-aware than the woman in its branches. The cherry tree looks back at itself under the bright light of the flash, as the figure shields her face. In these landscapes, as well as in my interiors and portraits, I have used photography as a means to explore absence and an attempt to relocate myself in an environment that once knew me. By imaging the fertile, agricultural fields of southern Sweden in a state of dormancy, I upend the expectations and mythologies of the land. Pointing to surfaces of slowness I suspend my encounter in time.  

Our bodies, and the land are timekeepers with their own circadian rhythms. I grew up measuring time by harvests in the center of an agricultural community. My summers were bookmarked by fertilizing seasons when the house would fill with the pungent scent of manure, which lingered for several days until the winds shifted. In late July tractors would slowly snake their way through the fields towards the house, stirring up clouds of chaff and bone dry top soil. By the end of August colossal mounds of sugar beets would pile up on the roadsides and the fields were dotted with bales of shrink wrapped hay. 

I began this project in earnest in December of 2023 while home on winter break and visiting my mother in Southern Sweden. I came equipped with a list of mental images that had risen to the surface of my consciousness, waiting to be realized. In a 2005 red Volkswagen Polo with my mother and sister, I set out in search of these compositions. We drove through the winding country roads with my gaze fixed on the horizon. Every so often pulling off onto the road’s thin overgrown shoulder so that I could photograph the bleak winter landscape.  

Several nights in a row my mother and sister begrudgingly joined me in search of a white deer that occasionally haunts the neighboring fields. Southern Sweden’s fallow deer are short in stature, their backs just barely clearing the fields of wheat in the summertime, but their small frames are eclipsed by disproportionately large palmate antlers. Amongst the local herd of tawny deer there is at times a white buck with a majestic rack that extends towards the sky. With flashlights in hand my sister and I hung out the windows of the car searching for his reflective eyes in the night. We never did find him, but our search led us to his herd that mistrustfully stared back at us from the deep shadows of the field. 

In these images, the fields lay in anticipation. Sowed, tilled and harvested, the clay-heavy soil densely compacted by rain. Only the occasional hollow stalk of last summer’s harvest remains. Seas of wheat, barley and safflower are at once a memory and a premonition. I see myself reflected in the dormant landscape, waiting for life to return. In my images ‘winter’ represents both the coldest, darkest season of the year and as a season of prolonged interiority.

When we were children, at the height of summer, on a cloudless day, my sister and I would run through fields of wheat and barley with abandon, the chaff itching our skin for hours afterwards. As a test of courage I would fall forward, trusting the slender stalks to catch me. But here, in the gloaming, I am merely playing a child and reenacting a ritual. What are these in-between worlds I have fallen into? Like Peter Pan chasing his shadow, I engage with this illusive, slippery surrogate of myself lingering on the threshold between childhood and adulthood.

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 searching for a place to stand. My images are simultaneously myth-making and truth-seeking. I attempt to define and locate myself within their periphery. As I make the image, the image in turn makes me.