Heaven's flowers
Can be picked as well...
‘Carefully!’,
because these flowers are fragile too. Luckely, they don’t perish. Heaven’s flowers stay with us forever. Unfortunately, we are not continuously aware of this. It can be like walking through a meadow full of flowers that is overgrown by grasses. However, unprepared and unexpected, we sense the full beauty of a heavenly flower through a color, an odor or maybe even a flower from earth. And like the flower rises up towards
the sun, this encounter lets us travel to a blissful realm where everything is pure, shiny, colorful and in balance. After we ground ourselves on the earth again, we see flowers everywhere, on the side of our roads and flowers in the sky.
The Mandala
is like the flower wanting to attract your attention. It screams:
‘Look at me.
Go towards my center!’
Guided by this art we surrender and get lost in each micro cosmos, reaching the world’s center and also our own. We can use mandalas in our everyday life, like putting flowers on our table in the middle of the room. We pick the flowers that attract us at the very moment. In birth and death different flowers decorate the scenes of our life. Like flowers, mandalas can help us to move through both beautiful and difficult times.
Technique
This art project consists of photographic mandalas. I open and close the shutter of the camera 8 times, each time rotating the camera ±45 degrees around its own axis, while continuously focusing on the exact same focus point. With each subsequent re-exposure I let the light fall on the same picture again, so that in the camera eight exposures are
merged into one resulting photo. In nature there is usually no pure symmetry. The same goes for this footage. Between each re-exposure there is a short period of time during which the situation changes: the river flows on, the flower moves in the wind, the duck dives under water. I also take the photo by hand. The angle degree is never exactly 45
degrees. The results of these small differences still surprise me. Just like in life many events happen in patterns, yet are slightly different every time.
The pictures are taken during my hitchhiking trips all over the world, reflecting the always present beauty of life, colors, shapes, water, earth and sky.