My photographic series Pneuma presents familiar objects—withered leaves, seed pods, flowers in transformation—as something else entirely: alien specimens, deep-sea creatures, or a form of life yet unknown. Isolated against a stark black background and floating without any sense of scale or context, they possess an unsettling, hallucinatory clarity. This hyperrealistic effect is achieved by digitally weaving dozens of images, each taken with a subtle shift in focus, into a single composite that renders every surface with almost endless detail.

The series originated not in scientific inquiry, but in a period of forced stillness. After a concussion required me to step away from screens and deadlines, I began a healing ritual of daily walks, collecting oddities of nature. This practice, born from necessity, has since evolved into a seasonal ritual tied to the long, dark Danish winters. I bring the fragments home, and in my studio, they are transformed.

The title, Pneuma, is ancient Greek for ‘breath,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘soul.’ The concept is deepened by the Danish word for breath, ‘åndedræt’, which translates literally as "to draw the spirit in". Herein lies a central idea of the work: that life is a shared breath, something existing between us as much as within us.

While the series echoes the exacting precision of scientific illustrators like Ernst Haeckel, my goal is not documentation. Instead, I use hyperrealism to propose a form of animism, revealing the latent, mysterious life force contained within the objects we so often overlook. Pneuma is an ongoing project, a cyclical gathering of motifs that connects me to the sensuous world, to the life that surrounds me, to the breath of the world. It is åndedræt.