Echo

A decade ago I heard about a magical place through a radio documentary, It was a former monastery in the north of France which had been transformed into an artist in residence. Isolated from the rest of the world and within its proximity only nature and a sleepy little town. I was fascinated by the stories I heard in this radio documentary. Moreover, the monastery was formerly used as the house of a cult and as a refuge for wounded soldiers in the First World War.

It took a couple of years before I was able to visit and in my head it became a mythical place. And mythical it was. The first time I was there I just walked around for days to take it all in. It was inhabited by people who spent their days secluded from the daily pace of life and could only surrender to themselves and their work. Some people referred to their stay as approaching a blank canvas, everything has to come from within you and there is nowhere to run.

Year after year I returned to work on my own projects. During these periods I felt safe to spend time just thinking, asking questions without having to find an answer. In the summer of 2018 I decided to fully focus my photography practice on portraiture. I thought of the monastery and how the French sunlight filters through the windows and illuminates the people and their characters. I decided these inhabitants of this place would become the subject of my first long-term portrait project.

The individuals visiting the monastery -artists, writers, dancers, philosophers, etc.- all have similar reasons for coming, making sense of their thoughts and ideas. I aim to capture them at that moment in time and the energy surrounding them. However, these portraits tell as much about the sitters as about myself. They form a self-portrait, through which not only my sitters’, but also my own wanderings come to the surface.