Grove
My father left early in my life to start a new life in his homeland Greece. Growing up in Sweden I often felt like an outsider and torn between people, places cultures – Sweden, Greece and Austria. In 1995 I finally moved to New York.
A few years ago my father passed away in cancer, leaving behind some property. My two brothers both inherited houses. Being a woman I was given the very least – half of an old olive grove up in the hills. Could I live in what had been given to me, in what had come to symbolize my inheritance and roots? As an experiment to explore the idea of home and my own personal history, I traveled to Crete in 2010 to spend entire nights in the grove.
The series represents a sleeping body and the idea of compressing (and stretching) time through long exposures into the two dimensional frame. Essentially a diary – it is an investigation of time which deals with the physicality, surface and ambiguities of the imaginary and material world. The work speaks about domesticity, cultural and gender identity and personal/collective history. The repetition of a body asleep in the cocoon of the hammock, talks about safety as well as vulnerability. The representation of the body dissolved and re-materialized through the long exposures functions as a metaphor for impermanence, transience and loss.
