Disko Bay N°44 Photograph - Limited Edition of 10

Featured work in the exhibition "Disko Bay" shown in the Museo Civico di Zoologia in Rome 12.7 - 25.9.2022. This series is named after the western coastal region of Greenland, Disko Bay - an area known for its masses of floating icebergs calving from the inland glacier ice field into the sea fjord near Ilulissat. In summer 2019, I traveled there to take photographs, witnessing the ecological fragmentation of climate change up close.The floating landscapes of these moving giants in their monochrome setting were purely sublime - but as I later discovered, they were difficult to describe with photography alone. This difficulty drove me to further mutate my photographic prints - adding free-floating spontaneous forms and layers of abstraction with paint. Here, Disko Bay takes place: halfway between photography and painting, through multiple layers of photographic transformations by photographing, repainting and photographing again. I constantly aim to reach a certain point of dimensional shift, a certain kind of absence; a metamorphosis through imagination. The original landscape transforms into a more mystical, hidden place. One could read this work as a gesture of repairing and conservation, a protective veil draped over the slowly melting icebergs. Through this intervention with paint, the landscape reflects its natural, unique fragility in a different way. I see a close relation between this fragility and the uniqueness of abstract brush movement. We actually start seeing through this process of hiding. In some of the works, the original photograph nearly or completely disappears; the paint intervention shows new landscapes and singularity. As an artist I’m interested in ephemeral and hidden spaces, and the memory that places possess. The nebulous ghostly paintings take the landscape into abstraction, touching on questions of losing and forgetting: losing memories that vaporize into the void.