The series is dedicated to my grandmother, Sigríður Candi, who will always be an inspiration.

Heart-to-Heart is a series of surreal and dreamlike images in which nature, reflected on itself, is blended with paintings of clouds. The paintings were created by my late grandmother, Sigríður Candi, a lifelong artist. In the ample time I spent with my grandmother as a child, she often spoke about her love of clouds and their ephemeral beauty; a beauty that exists for a mere moment. After my grandmother passed away, my family wanted to document her life’s work and build a digital catalog. For this purpose, I photographed those of her works that were still owned by the family. I approached this in a systematic fashion, taking careful copy photographs. This process not only showed me how vast my grandmother’s legacy was, but also allowed me to explore what my grandmother and I have in common as artists and where we differ. In an artist statement that I found, written by my grandmother back in 1990 about her cloud paintings, she explains how they are intended to provide a purely emotional experience for the viewer, rather than a literal representation. This statement really resonates with my own thinking and approach to photographic image-making.

A few months later, I started experimenting with combining my grandmother’s paintings with my own photography using digital compositing techniques. In doing this, I discovered a resonance that sparked the Heart-to-Heart series. I created the images in an iterative process. The resulting images, harmonizing our work’s content and expression, not only speak to our individual aesthetics but also embody new and unique visual statements. The images present something of a dialog – a heart-to-heart conversation – between myself and my grandmother.

Separated by two generations, my grandmother and I both tried to capture moments of natural beauty with our different media. Bringing our two aesthetics together has allowed me to reconnect with her memory, and creating the series has been a very therapeutic experience. In this spirit I hope that these images will provide viewers with an opportunity for visual meditation.