/ KAUPO KIKKAS
Photo series Treescape
When attempting to describe that feeling, I discovered that there are no words for it. There simply aren’t and that’s it. Thus I have been trying to say it with a camera for years now. Giving my thoughts freedom and hoping that my eyes and hands can do more with a camera than the rigid lexicology we have been taught. I am not a tree hugger, an esoteric, or particularly religious, but when I’m standing in the forest, I always get this undefinable feeling and desire to describe it. I have been aided a lot by the writings of Herman Hesse and Valdur Mikita, or perhaps not the texts themselves but the authors’ desire to describe a feeling that cannot be described.
Old, wind-worn grey planks of wood have caught my eye as far as I can remember, I have always admired old houses and fishing sheds with great love. Even though the tree which has become a structure, has been dead for hundreds of years, I see a story in the cracked and patterned plank that has lasted for more than a generation.
I have also used such wood in my work – in the first hundred years the tree matured, the next hundred years it spent as a part of a wall and now that the building has decayed and nature has taken over again, I picked up the old wood and gave it a role in my own story.
In order to stress what is important and to remove as much of the natural environment from the picture as possible, I have chosen the classical black and white medium. The pictures have a lot of texture and patterned dynamics accompanied by several double exposures.*