Aeterna

Aeterna is a photographic landscape project that draws its inspiration from Edmund Burke’s theory of the “Sublime” and the Jungian archetype of the Puer Aeternus (eternal child). 

The eternal child is full of unbounded instinct and whimsy. Not confined to mere playfulness, this archetype offers the potential for growth, adventure, and hope for the future at the same time as it threatens to veer into chaos, disorder and danger.

Terror is essential to the experience of nature as sublime; nature is vast and powerful, inspiring both fear and awe. This intermingling of pleasure and terror, wonderment and foreboding that creates the sublime is also present in the experience of childhood - especially when viewed from the vantage point of adulthood. Children are wonderfully naive, unaware of the dangers that surround them, partaking in nature without truly understanding its danger and power.

The figures in Aeterna are dwarfed by the landscape that surrounds them, highlighting not only the children's vulnerability, but also the sense of freedom and independence within these vast natural spaces. It is the anticipation of terror that makes these imagined scenes sublime. There is a heightened anxiety as the viewer attempts to imagine what would happen next. If the camera shutter captured only one tiny moment in this story, what occurred after the shutter closed?