ABOUT Pågående

anita oosterloo

I love the North. The space, the silence, the desolation, the light and the shapes in Scandinavia inspire me. I photograph in endless forests, in the solitude of the bare fells, in abandoned harbors, in churches and around uninhabited houses. I sometimes experience a sense of endlessness there. In this way, I can lose the sense of how big and far away something is in the landscape, and I disappear into it. Or I look for openings in the boundaries to see what else could be. Something similar happens to my experience of time: not as clock time, but condensed or elongated, time that can be eternal in a single moment. Not the time that passes, but as the approach of a perpetually new beginning.

In this project, called pågående (Swedish for ‘ongoing’), I explore how my experience of these abstract concepts of space and time can become an image. I do this by photographing, as well as by collecting finds from nature and by making collages and assemblages. These media shape my looking, finding and making. I thereby show only what is necessary, I leave out all the extraneous. This is how I abstract reality. I make an image detached from that one place and that one moment, an image that suggests more than meets the eye.

My images show colors that are marked by age, that have been touched by time. They do not oppose each other, but seek each other out. They are halftones with which I detach things from exact recognition, colors in shadow, and out of reach of clock and calendar.

With these colors and with these various media, by abstracting and showing not the whole but a part, I want to suggest space and time in my images and let them be experienced. I want to slow the gaze and evoke a desire to see what is not (yet) there.