Notes from Blåmann

With 'Notes from Blåmann', Gudd explores the relation to mountain landscapes as source of inner strength and imagination. This work draws on Blåmann, a mountain range situated on the island of Kvaløya in Northern Norway, the sight of which has been accompanying Gudd in her everyday life for the past year. As Robert Macfarlane puts it in 'Mountains of the Mind', "at the bottom, Mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia". Through the medium of collage, Gudd intervenes with her analogue photography through manual gestures, playing with light, transparency and materiality, to compress in the end layer after layer with her smartphone to one single collage note. An intuitive process that mirrors the complexity with which our culturally influenced interpretations imagine mountains into being.