The work developed from 2019 onward and is protected by BONO and international copyright laws.
Art delivers the soul from suffering through the sublime grace of understanding.
Verērī (reverence), 2009 – 2023, film photography. The frames examine notions of inner and outer landscapes to invite quiet contemplation on the torsions within magnanimous notions of nature. Existential questions reveal negative and positive spaces where light and shadow form and reform each other. Emergent light offers a coruscation of the transcendental spaces and polymorphic layers of perception in these frames. The continual act of looking upon, into, and through, the images offer impressions of landscapes with an opening for viewers’ imagination. Through the performative apparatus of photography, the sensation of reverence is evoked through emotional granularity.
My personal aim in this work is the amelioration of life by looking closely at beauty as a means to heal suffering through understanding. The violence of ignorance brought about by thoughts lacking in understanding, I hope, can be transformed through the compassionate art of looking. These frames of acceptance are made to feel accessible as reminders to a deep ocean of inner peace, found wile looking. Photographs perform into minds through the imaginary realm, a sacred space I aim to responsibly work with. My personal ethos is this imaginary realm is a birthright and freedom to come to through choice. In a time flooded by images, the curiosity to look is worked with, to depolicize bodies by making each viewer agents of their own meaning.
Nature has always served as my church. My secular view differs from religion because it is not a human believing itself can be saved or needs to save the world, but that Nature contains records with gaps and errors in understanding, consistently revealing themselves through patterns in the time we have here on earth, and with each other. Consciousness as the awareness and compassion of another imbues a responsibility to choice with a great weight. Forces such as those observed through the landscape are remembered as having been touched. Even if humans have not touched nature with memory, gravity grounds the realm of the conceptual, or ideal, through forces of human action. By attempting to remove the “I” while working with a camera, an unselfing gives a space to connect through intention and instinct resulting in surprising images. The framing of what is there, seems to be the main bodily drive, where the machine of a camera becomes mental, visceral, visual, at the same time. The conceptual differences in the divided meaning of what Spirit is: psyche, personal, universal, eternal or bodied are what I hope these images can transcend.
The photographs visualise a spectrum of feeling through landscape forms. By attuning my senses to an ontological memory, I allowed my instinct to be guided to through forest scenes to depict the transformative dynamics of life. The visual metaphors coincided with histories I felt within my body. In a hypnogogic state, the elements within nature invited attention to the appearance of conflicts as vivid image impressions. Beauty and brutality, finite and unrelenting, pain and reprieve, memories are represented as chromatic windows to relentless changes in the ways life, seasons, and societies, grow and fall. The self-organizing quality of nature is brought into focus, inviting viewers to embrace plurality. The Vereri images developed into artistic research project: Aesthetic Resonances.
L’Œil de la Photographie featured a selection, March 2023. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com Virtual Reality videos by Aaron Alvic Schroeder
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-Mari Amman, March 2023, Paris, France
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Original artworks by Mari Amman. VR model created by Aaron Alvic Schroeder. Music of Julian Bream.
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SKJELL, SHELL, SJEL (SOUL), 2015, photography. Understanding the meaning of soul has confounded philosophers and theologians for centuries. In Norwegian language, skjell means shell, and sjel means soul. The mark between shell and soul is the letter form K. In this way,
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2015, Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway. Photographed in the autumn of 2015. Black and white film.
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