Iris

Playing around with shape, thinking about how beautiful flowers are as they start to die. And the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition at Tate.

Cosmos

Winter Light I

Birthday Sunflower

Through various practices in my life at the moment, I am getting better at understanding what it means to meditate - or what it means to me: going into myself, searching for the quieter tuned in side of existing. I am thinking about how this state has happened by itself in my past, and always accompanied by great creative inspiration. When that feeling of inspiration and connectedness with the world is not there, I wonder what happened.

So, I am getting better at seeing that stresses and worries, too many distractions etc. etc. are what take us away from that quiet space, but it takes experience to be able to recognise it in order to learn to prioritise it.

Which comes first - the quiet connectedness with the world or the looking? Looking - a concentrated focusing on the things in the world, probably through beauty, though I don't think beauty has a fixed meaning - I am talking about the feeling of the beautiful whereby feelings come with and cause actions from us. The inside/outside thing again, human skin as interface: do we find beauty in looking or does the beautiful find us?

These are of a sunflower that a dear friend gave me for my birthday.

...and my Bornholm favourites:

Bornholm

I just went on a short trip to Bornholm, Denmark.
It was the first time I've had in a long while to reconnect with photography and nature.
I came away wondering what a critical photography practice of mine would look like...

Critical - i.e. that problematises, that raises questions, that delimits (as I understand it).

And, after reading Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (ed. Alliez and Osborne), I am re-reminded of the importance of history and materialism, and am wondering how it would be possible to reconcile image making (photography) with this aim.

Here's an assortment of images that are doing different things, but I wouldn't say they were critical. That's the problem, and I suspect the only way such a thing might be possible would be through some heterogeneous element(s).

Tree Nipples

 

Cornwall 2012