Metamorphosis, Series 3

Returning each year to wilderness forests in Scandinavia where she has family roots, Anna turns her attention to subtle shifts and nuances in the natural light, often as reflected in water or held in the humidity of dusk. These become the subject of her images, more than specific landscape anchor points.

Focussing on internal states that colour the view of the landscape, Anna takes up a theme of transformation, as visualised through layered and progressing images.

Working on a level of affect, Anna’s images appeal via the viewer’s senses to their feeling and intuitive faculties. That is: by the physicality of viscerally experiencing the images, the viewer is prompted to feel with a less frequently experienced subconscious part of themselves: the part of you that dreams, that makes leaps of faith and that can combine previously paradoxical seeming poles of thought into a new whole. This is a self for whom time is not linear and that is easily able imagine resolutions and transformations that the rational mind alone cannot.

Her three Metamorphoses series (from 2013, 2016 and 2021) – all made on colour medium format film – use this gentle process to encourage the viewer to step beyond the familiar and to open to experiencing unexplored territories within themselves. These untouched wilderness landscapes call to our desire to experience the Sublime in our natures: a mixture of light and dark, of the terrifying and the uplifting, a sense of being small and humbled next to the enormity of wild nature and cycles of time, much larger than those we perceive.

To dare to formulate new meaning and fresh constellations out of tired old matter.

By using a physical process of repeating and layering images on film, Anna is able to move further away from the literal and into a purer abstracted realm, creating depth, texture and a painterly presentation of almost otherworldly images.

Familiar reference points recede and navigation becomes relative and relational, as firm footing on solid ground (or, as here, floating peat bog) gives way to swirling cloud, water and etherscapes, all deep in the twilight Nordic forest.

To purchase any of the pictures from this series, please visit my webshop page.

The works are currently available as 20 inch x 20 inch (51cm x 51cm) C-type prints mounted onto PVC, with an easy hanging system of a subframe and hooks on the back.

Installation Views:

The series was first shown in the ‘Body of Water’ group exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills gallery, Farsley / Leeds, January – April 2021.