‘In a green shade, (Butterfly house)’ is a sphere with one continuous image across its entire surface, in the much same was as a globe, in that there is no left or right, top or bottom. The image is a photo-stitch consisting of images of the interior of the butterfly house at Rotterdam zoo.

Still at the Rotterdam Zoo, I was equally fascinated by the butterfly house. A most unusual, progressive form of looking was created by the enclosure: a form of fully immersive vision. The enclosure is a densely planted greenhouse which you can navigate using its looped path. The butterflies surround you, everywhere yet elusive. Visitors freeze like disjointed trees awaiting flittering settlers or hunt with frenzied zoom and feverish snapping. In the enclosure you don’t know where to look, the environment fully immersive, and thus most importantly the visual hierarchy completely broken. Many times I tried to photograph this experience, but always failed to capture what I found so radical. I was not interested in representing this experience, but rather of attempting to create a work that to some degree simulated it. At a certain moment I realised that it was me standing there with the camera which was spoiling my shot by creating the very visual hierarchy who’s absence I wanted. Realising this pushed me towards an idea of creating in a sphere a kind of inversion of the butterfly house, thus creating an image without a stable position in which to look at it.

‘Borderline Picturesque & the Recounting Prospect, (part two)’ is a wooden dressing screen with a landscape photography printed directly across the laser cut mdf panels. This work was inspired in part by the lacquer dressing screens of Eline Gray, and in part by the patterns and aesthetics I encountered in Northern Norway. I believe the way we encounter an image is of fundamental importance to its reading. With this work I was interested in experimenting with the possibilities of challenging the cultural hegemony of image based works being staged on a wall. It was my intention to experiment with destabilising the position from which you’re meant to experience an image; taking the sideways glimpse as an alternate model and the dressing screen as a domestic object that exemplifies the glimpse.

‘Borderline Picturesque & the Recounting Prospect, (part three)’, a sound work, addresses the desire and myths of exploring a foreign and forbidding landscape. I had images from Norwegian Polar Research Centre translated into text by a professional audio describer. This specific form of translation attempts to objectively convert the visual information into language and in so doing de-contextualise the images, leaving their underlying seduction abstract from any concrete situation. It is my home that the resulting works go beyond specific local politics, and speak more generally about our relationship to the land we occupy and the myths we build around that.

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