Nine months
Pregnancy is a miracle. I understood it fully only when I found out I was pregnant and month after month watched my belly grow. As the little kicks from within me intensified, I couldn’t stop marvelling at how perfect nature was. Even though it is obvious how new life begins and since the beginning of time babies have been born the same way, I’m still astounded that I am able to give life to a new human being. It seems incredible that there is life inside me which from a tiny little seed has grown into a baby, a new person, a new story in the book of life. It stroke me as a revelation and it further deepened my admiration for the mechanisms of the universe.
No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you. After all, you are the only one who knows what my heart sounds like from the inside.
As an expecting mum and a photographer I couldn’t just admire that miraculous state in the mirror. I needed to document the development of the life within me. I didn’t just want to take photos of my belly though. That wouldn’t be fulfilling enough. I needed to find a way of linking pregnancy with nature. When I think nature, I think forest, trees, flowers. Since I couldn’t bring a forest home, I opted for flowers. Every month I went to a flower market or a nearby meadow, set up black background next to my living room window and took photos of myself and the flowers to then edit and merge the shots together.
I set off imagining the project in colour, but as I got to the end of it, I found the colours too distracting. Although beautiful, they were obscuring the message. In colour the flowers dominated too much and I didn’t want nature to dominate, I wanted it to be in symbiosis with the body. Turning the images into a black and white series and working on them in greyscale brought me to where I wanted to get – to a subtle fusion of the feminine and the nature in full bloom.
