Altered Places are psychotopographic landscapes. They begin with a real site in Flensburg or the surrounding coastal landscape, encountered as it is: walking, wandering, looking. I start outdoors, paying attention to what is immediately there: the glint of light on water, shifting colours, the geometry of the landscape, reflections, movement, the peculiarities of a particular stretch of coast. Then I take the work into the studio and continue looking.

Except, of course, I am no longer looking in quite the same way.

The longer I work on an image, the more the place becomes entangled with everything I bring to it: cultural background, memories, past experiences, losses and joys, hope and grief, habits of perception and ways of making sense. What begins as an attempt to depict a particular place gradually becomes something else. The landscape is still there, but it has been altered by the person looking at it.

This is perhaps the most obvious impossibility of perception: we never see a place exactly as it is. We see it through ourselves. There is no neutral gaze, only different degrees of awareness of what we bring into the act of looking.

The works in Altered Places therefore move between observation and distortion, recognition and estrangement. They are mixed-media works on paper and canvas in which a real landscape becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the perceptual landscape unfolding within me.

The place is altered. So is the gaze that looks at it.