Weekend Portfolio: Svava Tergesen

Images and Text by Svava Tergesen

Using foods, fabrics, and archival materials, my work reimagines experiences of domestic life. In my images, I attempt to discover the point at which one thing becomes another entirely, interrogating how our understanding of identity and truth are constructed. My photographs are typically made by cooking, splicing and assembling food into perishable collages or sculptures, which then endure as images. By bringing different materials and processes into unlikely unions, my work considers how the camera can accumulate and meld together disparate elements, to spark sensations of disorientation or dis-ease. 

The series I Want to Paint a Rose investigates cooking as a means of image-making. Using archival material from women’s magazines and cookbooks, the images speak to how photography has been used to disseminate standards of taste, class and health. In the series, I’ve attempted to explore how the camera can assemble and transmute different elements to create a perceptual gestalt, so that the individual elements begin to melt into one another, much like cooking.

More of Svava Tergesen’s work can be found on her website.