Behind the scenes

The story behind the diving gannet.

On a day in July 2022 I was at the beach in Jammerbugten in North Jutland.

At that time there was an outbreak of bird flu in the gannet-colonies in Scotland. Thousands of birds died. Several washed ashore on the west coast of Denmark.

With all the personal protection possible I carefully collected one of them to make a cyanotype.

I wanted to get close to my imagination of a diving gannet and therefor I chose to make a wet cyanotype with dots of foam. The paper was covered with plastic because I did not want any contact between the bird and the paper.

It was exposed in the sun and the picture was developed in running water afterwards.

Exposing in bright sunlight. Because the emulsion is wet it starts developing immediately.

Developing in running water.

The story behind "In Flanders Fields".

This summer, on the backdrop of escalating war rhetoric, I made a ritual collecting of fallen petals of poppies on daily basis for 4 weeks – one week for every year of WW1. The petals were put on a newspaper to dry and after 5 days there was a little handful of dried petals to keep. 28 portions of petals with the color caput mortum/doddenkop.

The red color faints and sadly it seems that the collective memory of horrors of war to faint in these years….

The guns went silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918 on Armistice Day. World War 1 ended.

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Poem by John McCrae

“For a more than a century the common poppy has been the delicate botanical symbol of the horrors of war. This plant grows in many places where the soil has been disturbed, like fields, roadsides, and, yes, battlefields.

McCrae wrote the poem as a reaction to his friend’s death.

The poem quickly became associated with remembering the horrors of war, not through flashing medals or volleys of gunfire, but by the haunting image of the red flowers of a simple wildflower growing between graves and on the churned soil of the battlefield….