FACTS
Title: Nature hidden in plain sight (Naturen som vi ser eller overser)
30 fine art photographs by Birthe Havmøller
Artist’s Statement
This art project is a visual poem about Nature. It consists of 30 fine art photographs. It took its final form in 2024: a long narrative with works in three different formats (panorama, A3 and A4). The works are small and intimate. They invite the viewer to get up close and take their time to immerse themselves in nature’s small details and sculptural forms as poetic metaphors.
I project my inner imaginary landscapes out into the world and photograph them. This method is an intuitive searching process; a search for a state of being and a spiritual realisation of unity with Nature in a time when society’s technological development invariably moves us further and further away from Nature. Here, as mainstream media discuss climate crises and pandemics, and people go for a walk in Nature in search of a true safe space, I focus on creating works that depict the harmony and poetry of Nature. This body of work is a manifestation of a gaze and synchronicities with nature that are more important than ever before.
Photo-based art will always be a depiction of a ‘real world’ and an artwork with a message that can open your consciousness to another dimension, another interpretation, another story. By photographing the edges of the cultural landscape, I seek out spaces where one can find one’s way into a secret world. Small, unique places that I feel a connection with and can enter into a dialogue with. The result of my dialogue with Nature is a stream of images that depict a familiar diversity of small details and is a poetic space that we at the same time both recognize and have become accustomed to overlooking in our busy daily lives, where our greatest contact with nature may be a potted plant in the living room, a Christmas tree, or a peble sitting on the windowsill.
See the Nature Hidden in Plain Sight portfolio
Birthe Havmøller’s creative practice
Classic black-and-white photography is the core of my artistic practice. My new works are an extension of the analogue photography and photopolymer prints I made in the 1990s. The enigmatic has a recurring place in my imagery in the form of the old divine symbols: vesica piscis, the circle, the spiral, etc. Since 2015, I have refined my visual language and printed my photographs as archival fine art inkjet prints on cotton paper. It is important to me that the first impression you get when you touch the work/sheet is a lovely, subtle sensory experience of the paper’s organic structure.
2024. Tangring (Seaweed Ring) and Svanerne (The Swans) from Nature Hidden in Plain Sight.