These photos are close to my heart. I have been in two minds about posting them because they can so easily come across as something they are not. The trouble is, I find I cannot easily explain what they are. Just to give an example, they are not linked to anything new-agey, and although I have often, in the past, referred to them as my “Lunar Rituals”, there is actually nothing ritualistic about them either. A closeness to nature is perhaps the best way to put it. Intertwined with art. And with the randomness of the moment. Let me tell you how it all started… (or, if you’d rather skip the reading and just see the photos, scroll down a bit and you’ll find them right there).
I have always been particularly fascinated by the moon and had a curiosity about past cultures that have worshipped it. Adoring the sun is just common sense… clearly our lives and livelihoods depend on it. The same goes for the moon, of course… but that was not obvious thousands of years ago. And yet, the moon was revered. In the late 1990’s, after several years of art school (and falling in love with copper), I had started feeling an increasing need to create something that was bigger than myself. Something I could embrace… or, perhaps, something that could embrace me. Something in nature that I could immerse myself in. And it so happened that in December 1999 the full moon was particularly large. I was visiting my grandmother’s farm in Denmark that very day, and had (for the first time in my life) an evening alone there. I grew up in a house across the way from the farm (there was only a cow pasture between us) and the the fields, the trees (and yes, also the cows) just breathed… childhood. And home. I bought large garden lights and grabbed my camera and a chair (as I didn’t have a tripod with me) and went down to the fields… and couldn’t believe my eyes when I found a perfectly round, very large puddle of water in the middle of one. I placed the candles around it and took photos. I was in some of the photos myself, using the timer on my analog camera, and in others I just captured the reflection of the circle of candles in the old farm windows. The moon appeared in a few photos, but not all. That was the starting point. The result can be seen in the margin here. None of my photos, then or since, were edited in any way, save for cropping. No photoshopping, no fixing.The following spring I found a deserted hilltop close to my home in Malmö and went there as the full moon rose, bringing along the same camera. Using the (silent) timer meant I wasn’t in the majority of the photos, although I tried to be. And when I was, the result was often so unclear it was useless. Also, I could not tell from one photo to the next what to correct. But each roll of film would have one, or sometimes two, photos that – while perhaps not impressive from a technical perspective – did capture the magic. I did not want perfection or objectively great photos. I wanted the feeling. And I wanted it to be genuine.I ventured back to my hilltop every full moon when the clouds cooperated. I stopped wearing (much) clothing. It was never about nudity, but when I wore clothes they added too much to the images. They were a visual distraction. I sometimes brought a candle as an extra light source, and a thin scarf as an accessory. And later on I built my own wings. The only other addition was what nature itself provided. Late one evening I heard a roaring sound, increasing by the second. I knew there were supposed to be sheep on the hill, but had never seen any. And this was too loud for sheep. Moments later, before I had a chance to take any kind of action, three horses appeared, rushing up to join me on the hilltop. And there they stayed. Keeping me company. Sniffing my candle. (Actually blowing it out on a few occasions.) Providing a warm presence in the cold summer night. But also causing a tiny bit of a problem for my photos. I did not have many seconds on my basic timer on that analog camera, which was placed on a tripod a little bit down the hill, so after clicking the shutter I had to run up to the top where the horses were, in time for the ‘click’, but not so fast I’d scare them off. This resulted in lots of photos with just the horses in them. But also several gems…Later on I had a full moon night on a rooftop in southern Sweden, a frozen December full moon on the island on Tjörn (when it was so cold that, in spite of actually wearing clothes, my fingers could not feel if they had pressed the shutter or not…) and finally, in the fall of 2002, a night with the full moon on the east coast of Skåne. Spanning nearly three years, these photographic adventures became my meditation in a (non-spiritual) way. I did connect with nature. I enjoyed the inescapable presence of the moon. And when I drove home, late at night, with gravel in my socks, grass stains on my fingers and two rolls of undeveloped film in my pocket, I was filled with an undeniable rush of inspiration and gratitude to the night.
