Awoiska van der Molen
Friday, 29 March 2019
Work from her oeuvre.
“If Nature were to take a photo of itself, what would it look like? Nature would set its own exposure time, with plenty of lux during the day in the sunshine, and clear and dark at night with a full moon. Exposure would need to be lengthy, since Nature, in the sense of a group of living things in a landscape of rock and uneven ground, exists on an organic timescale of minutes, weeks, years. A shutter speed of one hundredth of a second offers merely the perspective of a carrier pigeon, which can distinguish 125 images per second. But a tree in all its glory in its natural setting requires an exposure of half an hour in the light of a crescent moon, or half a minute when the sun is low in the sky. The distance between subject and camera is a matter of metres, or tens of metres if you want to capture the bliss of a fringe of woodland on a hilltop at dusk, or hundreds of metres for a mountain turning its creased rhino-back to you in a gesture of friendship. What would be the joy revealed to us by Nature — specifically that little gathering of delicate, twiggy, dancing trees in white light — if it weren’t photographed and turned into an image that we, viewers, human beings, recognise as proof of living reality?” – Arjen Mulder excerpted from an essay for van der Molen’s monograph, Blanco.