In the afternoons, I often go for a walk in the forest with our daughter in her pram. One day, there was a white child’s shoe at the entrance to the forest, like a little Croc. The white plastic stood out brightly against the forest floor, the shoe’s curved, arch-like structure setting it apart from its surroundings. Somehow, I was fascinated by the shoe – not really by the shoe itself, but by its presence. The image it was part of spoke to me. When I take photographs, I sometimes have a similar feeling, at best. Out of everything I see and perceive, a motif emerges. “There’s an image – take it with you!”
The next day, the shoe was no longer lying on the ground. Someone had carefully placed it on a tree stump at the entrance to the forest. The day after that, it was carelessly discarded on the other side of the path. Then it was standing on the electricity transformer to the left of the forest entrance. Then it was lying a few metres from the entrance, and finally it was back on the tree stump, neatly placed there again.
The shoe remained at the entrance to the forest for a long time. An alien presence that could not find its place, that did not conform to the laws of the forest, and yet played a part in it. In some way, the little shoe called the world of the forest into question: What and who belongs here?
As I lay down by the lake
It’s my mirror now
No one can pretend that I do not belong here
(“Animals will come”, Sophia Kennedy)
For me, the image of the shoe in the forest brought the relationship between nature and culture into focus. I found this fascinating, and it made me think of photographs I had taken in Berlin and Hamburg. Images in which I respond photographically to what my surroundings offer me. Photographs of windows, reflections, layers and urban vegetation. Images that came to me without me having set out to look for them.
I am very happy to be exhibiting together with Anna. She, too, is drawn to places where the grown and the made meet. Fragments of landscapes, organic structures, water surfaces and reflections appear in her recent drawings and paintings. Her works are often based on specific natural locations or landscape situations, but in the process they move away from their point of departure, expanding to incorporate memories and fragments from her own inner repertoire of images. Nature provides her with the material, the graphic inventions, structures, rhythms, contrasts and constellations from which she develops her images.
As I stumble inside
The branches of the forest are coming alive
(“Forest”, Ibadet Ramadani)
Timo Hinze, Ocotber 2026
