The images included in Vemod weave together an interest in photography’s ability to preserve detail, abstract form, and obscure and defamiliarize perception, with conceptual and visual references to a personal history. Scale is used as a method for making the viewer feel what I feel : a vacillation of grounded and off balance. This feeling mirrors my own experience as a European immigrant who has made a home in America but still experiences the strangeness of it.
All of the locations are specific places that have hidden information inside the landscape, brought out by the photograph. When meaning bubbles to the surface, the images remind me of a home and a childhood, provoked by smells and memories that sometimes feel too heavy to carry. My parents can no longer make the long trip to the U. S., which has made me think about access to the places and people that I love. Vemod is a collection of places I want to remember when the day comes that I can no longer make the trip over the Atlantic. Using a process I have developed for the past 4 years, which involves stitching together several photographs of the same scene, I have preserved as much detail as possible. I hope this may satisfy a longing for a home that at some point I will never see again.
* 'Vemod' is a Norwegian/Swedish word, which does not have a precise translation into English, but can be roughly translated as "a pensiveness or melancholy about the past".