During a residency on the island of Halsnoy in Norway, Dana Cojbuc created the photographic series Yggdrasil, named after the world-tree in Norwegian mythology.
In her images, Dana Cojbuc uses photography and drawing to capture reality and invest it with her dreams.
On this small Norwegian island, the dense and humid forest faces the vast sea, mixed with fog, from which emerge a few ghostly islets. There, nature imposed itself on Dana Cojbuc with force but without violence; the artist seems to have simply allowed herself to be caught up in the power of the elements.
The forest, above all, has become part of her memories and imagination. In Dana’s eye and under her fingers, the real Halsnoy forest takes on enchanting appearances: sometimes disturbing, sometimes soothing... always bewitching.
Dana Cojbuc’s photographic work is nourished by the contributions of other artistic techniques: the volume and depth of sculpture, the art of storytelling inherent in video, the exploration of the intimate through drawing...
For Dana, drawing is a way of reintroducing the secret part of reality that nourishes itself to grow, to palpitate, to escape from defined carcans. This is also the artist’s intention here: to give back organic contours to this nature that cannot be constrained in the perfect geometric form imposed by the camera. An image or a landscape will only become ours when we have placed in it a piece of ourselves, intimate and secret - fragments of dreams or a wave of the imagination - when a memory comes to be attached to it or when our desires come to invest it.