“Turning to face North, face the North, we enter our own subconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey North has the quality of dream.” –Margaret Atwood
This body of work reflects upon the dreamlike, melancholy quality of journeys to the Far North in the darkness of the polar night. Moving through a winter landscape of subdued color and artificial light, these images explore the way in which a world not governed by conventions of light or time seems to fall into the realm of the magical.
Following the lives and stories of a family in Northern Norway, the three themes of love, death, and the ocean recur frequently, woven into the fabric of this boreal world. The images are also motivated by these themes on a personal level: my love for this place and these people, a need to capture it before it is changed forever by the inevitability of death, and a fascination with the constant presence of an ever-changing ocean - under the constant gleam of the North Star in an ever-changing sky.
Exploring notions of longing, nostalgia, and timelessness, this series ultimately examines the way that the dynamic contrasts of the northern landscape cause us to feel, profoundly, the essence of being alive – by the sheer awe of warmth in absence of cold; by fleeting moments of glittering arctic light before the world plunges back into velvety blackness.