I use the process of taking photographs as a vehicle for thinking. When I set out to take pictures I usually have no fixed or pre-determined end-point. My method of working gives me the space to be constantly reflective and this in turn permits my work to develop in new and unforeseen directions. While the scene is being 'thought', I am able to ruminate on what might otherwise have remained hidden. I simultaneously engineer and happen upon my photographs. An interest in ambiguity - like the co-existence of intimacy and of distance - underscores my work. These paradoxes are encapsulated in the photographic image: a still frame that holds so many tensions, but at the same time is entirely opaque and doesn’t provide a clear answer. One cannot look behind the image to ‘find out’. *** " … art is like life: the further you advance into it, the broader it becomes." (Johann Wolfgang Goethe "Italian Journey I") What is worse - to wake up one morning like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and to discover that you have been transformed into an insect or to wake up with a hair between your teeth that you cannot get rid of, like the main character in Raymond Carver's short story The Hair? Both stories refer to an unalterable state, which the protagonists have come to terms with. Regine Petersen, who has named her photographic essay after Carver's story, also had a sudden and fateful experience in her life, which provided the inspiration for her present work. She found out about her grandmother's plans to sell off her farm and to buy a smaller house for her retirement. The farm in question was where the photographer had spent a large part of her childhood. Initially Regine Petersen planned to document the forthcoming events in photographic form. But she soon intuitively switched her attention to people and places that became increasingly linked with her own resurgent thoughts and feelings. The event itself began to fade more and more into the background, gradually becoming a distant resonator that gently echoed all her reflection and brooding. Regine Petersen thus created an open series of thought-images along the osmotic border between inside and outside and between improvisation and composition, as described by Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) in his book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art". These are quiet images, images in which space and time vibrate perceptibly but not visibly and in which the sensations of the present moment extend into the wide expanses of the past and the future. Being on the road, setting off with an intuited but not precisely defined goal is an attitude that is at variance with the bourgeois lifestyle, one that has always fascinated artists and writers but also explorers, globetrotters and modern "ne'er-do-wells". "There is nothing finer than setting off" writer Peter Handke once said in an interview on his obsessive wanderlust. Wandering around with the camera, drifting, finding without actually seeking, this is a working method that Regine Petersen has already used in other projects. She relies on and puts her faith in her flair and intuition. Intuition is a gift that cannot be grasped by the intellect and that many people therefore distrust. Goethe referred to it as "a revelation that emerges from the depths of a human being". In The Hair the photographer transforms an incisive experience and the sensations and thoughts triggered by it into an associative sequence of images that reflects essential questions of existence. Behind it the inner and outer path that is the creative source of these images shines through. Josefine Raab *** Finding the lost, seeing the unseen, and bringing them together in disjointed harmony The images wait to be discovered, relating to one another through some jumbled narrative that each viewer can only comprehend as an individual. Regine Petersen creates a discussion of such vastly disparate values that it could not be entered into with ease, nor could it be concluded. Each is an image within its own right but reliant on another for the protraction of the story. Like the creature, half floating, half sinking, the storyline is a variable to be decided. Karen Harvey, Gomma Magazine