Visual artist and photographer Anouk Gielen is fascinated by the relationships between man and nature. In her work, she continues the long tradition of representing nature both in art and in popular culture.

In several works, she is even literally quoting this tradition by using photographic copies of old paintings or photographic images from books on nature and and gardening. At the same time however, she is breaking with this tradition by underlining the ambiguousness of what we tend to call ‘nature’. In some series, she presents nature – often forests or individual trees – in fragmented form, pointing out rare and improbable forms and structures she finds there. In others, she uses various techniques, such as mirroring or montage and collage.

Even when using a realistic medium such as photography, Gielen shows very clearly that representations of nature are in fact constructions by the human mind and eye. She generates a new kind of beauty with her work, away from classical (and cliché) forms of nature photography and other forms of representation.