As a viewer, you quickly lose your sense of distance and scale: am I looking at a large, overgrown rock face, or at lichen on a boulder? With photographic framing, Petra Dekker carefully composes and abstracts what she sees. The expansive view versus a detail: two or three-panel works that visualize the unity of the large in the small, and vice versa.

A photograph of a dazzling starry sky, upon closer inspection, turns out to be blue-green algae in a ditch near Waterland. It may seem a lucky shot, but it reveals an openness of body and mind as a conditional state of being that allows us to receive the layers of experience of chance; with the camera, she captures the complexity and clarity of the moment as a precursor to the deconstruction of its memory on canvas.

'Traces des marées' (Traces of the tides) is a series of photographs depicting life in the
in-between space where sea becomes land. The traces left by the periwinkles in the algae are phenomenal: at one time alive (and erasable) and then again they seem to turn into stones, fossilized.