Anthropocene – seeing nature anew

Anthropocene is a word that can feel both heavy and abstract. It is used for our own age – a time when humans have become a geological force, on a level with glaciers, volcanoes, and ocean currents. But behind the term lies something more intimate: the experience of living in a world where nature is changing before our eyes, and where the traces we leave behind can no longer be washed away.

We are used to thinking of nature as something enduring and larger than ourselves. Mountains that stand, seas that move in eternal waves, forests that will always grow back. The Anthropocene quietly disrupts this image. Plastic in the ocean, microplastics in the body, heavy metals in the sediments, artificial lights along the coastlines, concrete steering the course of rivers – all of this becomes part of the earth’s memory. What we build, break down, burn, and throw away remains as layers, as imprints of a brief and intense human presence.

For me, the Anthropocene is not only a scientific claim, but a mood. It is the feeling of standing by a beautiful stretch of water and sensing that something is disturbed. Seeing a golden light over a landscape and knowing that it may also be the reflection of industry. Experiencing nature as a place of stillness, while at the same time feeling unease over all that is disappearing or changing forever. Beauty and vulnerability lie so close together that they can no longer be separated.

In my images, I try to approach this doubleness. I use photographs from water, coastlines, soil, and traces of intervention, and combine them with digitized paintings – layer upon layer. In some works, the forms dissolve, as if the landscape is losing its footing: earth becomes sludge, ice becomes water, solid lines become fluid. In other images, sharp angles, straight lines, and hard surfaces break into the organic. Nature is bounded, framed, held in place. Sometimes the light is beautiful and almost golden, yet also unnatural – like a warning light.

Abstraction creates space for what does not easily lend itself to words. When contours slip, and the motif is no longer “a place” or “an object,” it becomes possible to experience the image more as a state. A field of colour, rhythm, and light that can mirror both outer landscapes and inner responses. In this way, the Anthropocene can also be felt as more than statistics and graphs – as a bodily and emotional experience: grief, confusion, responsibility, but also wonder and tenderness.

At the same time, within this darkness there is another movement. The Anthropocene makes it clear that we have never stood outside nature. We are not observers at a safe distance, but participants – body, breath, minerals, water. When the boundaries between nature and culture begin to blur, it also opens for another way of seeing: What if we understand nature not as “that out there,” but as an extended self? As something sacred that we inhabit, rather than stand above.

For me, the quietest images carry a kind of prayer within them, even without words. A prayer for the shoreline. For the soil. For the light that still falls across the landscapes, despite all we have done to them. The Anthropocene is a brutal epoch – but perhaps also an invitation to awaken to a deeper sense of connection. To ask: How do we want to be present in this time? What kind of traces do we wish to leave – in the earth, in each other, in the invisible fields between us and all living beings?

The images and catalogues on IamNature are my contribution to this conversation. Not as answers, but as spaces in which to see more slowly, to listen inward, and perhaps to sense both the hurt and the sacred that are still present in nature – in the midst of the Anthropocene.