About the Work

(M)YSTERIA began with a fleeting encounter in London: seeing my face reflected in a mirrored window and experiencing the strange distance between the face I could see and the face I recognised as my own. This in-between space, between reality and reflection, presence and memory, became a point of departure for the series.

The works bring together ink painting, photography and digital processes of scanning, cropping and superimposition. Grid structures drawn from architectural and mathematical systems intersect with organic forms and fragments of places, bodies and surfaces. The grid becomes a way of thinking through time, space and embodiment, while layered photographic images introduce another kind of instability: one image can occupy several moments and spaces at once.

The work moves between the fleeting and the constructed. Photographs begin as passing encounters, while the finished images are built through repeated acts of layering, cutting, shifting and superimposing. What begins spontaneously is gradually organised into a constellation.

© Camilla Howalt