So this is exciting! My in-progress series “Dryads – The Treebound” has just won an honourable mention in the Fine Art section of the 17th Julia Margaret Cameron Award (part of the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards). It’s such an honour to have it highlighted like this. Huge thanks to FotoNostrum and the jurors Laura Noble of L A Noble Gallery and online gallerist Jennie Rickets!
Link to larger images in my portfolio: https://www.mariafynsknorup.com/works/dryads-the-treebound
About the series: The ancient Greek stories of the dryads are full of drama, beauty and anthropomorphised ways of explaining the mythical or inexplicable in the natural world. The dryads were honoured as semi-godlike female spirits inhabiting trees and groves, often bound in such a way that their life itself was tied to the life of the trees.
Creating this project around the dryads is for me a way to lift the stories into our time, and remind people that our lives are equally bound to the life of the natural world. We as humans need to wake up to the fact that we have become reliant upon natural resources to the point of destroying the foundation of what we need to live.
I wish to emphasise the mysterious, sometimes slightly eerie sensation you experience within older forests – when it feels like everything is alive, and someone might be watching.
The aim is to create a range of scenes from the peaceful or idyllic to the dark and haunted, drawing inspiration from classical paintings of the nymphs, as well as from descriptions in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and texts from the Greek Mythology.