The Dreams of Lioness Blixen
Loss, Landscape and Rebirth: A photographic exhibition by Catherine Wingfield, curated by Katy Barron

 London-based fine art photographer Catherine Wingfield presents The Dreams of Lioness Blixen, a new exhibition of thirty-one photographic works curated by Katy Barron, opening 14-18 September at Gallery Eight, London. The exhibition celebrates the natural world that profoundly shaped the Danish author Karen Blixen. Drawing on several years of research and photographic journeys through the landscapes of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania vividly described by Blixen, as well as to her home in Denmark. Wingfield's own relationship with landscape follows a similar instinct to Blixen's: finding in the natural world a language for memory, solitude, and emotional repair. 

Aged twenty-eight, Blixen arrived in British East Africa in 1914 to marry Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke and begin a new life. Her soul was deeply moved by the extraordinary land she discovered. Yet over the next seventeen years she endured illness, war, betrayal, bankruptcy, solitude, grief and sorrow. In 1931, broken and with almost nothing left, she returned to Denmark. During the long, gloomy years that followed, her suffering slowly turned into creative energy. Guided by her remarkable gift for storytelling and inspired by the radiant memory of East Africa, she began to write Out of Africa, a carefully curated account of her years there; the crafting of a myth, and ultimately an alchemy that transformed loss into healing and meaning. 

Rather than illustrating Blixen's biography, the exhibition is conceived as a photographic dialogue with her sensibility: an imagined inner Africa as much as a physical one. Through thirty one photographic works, Wingfield responds to Blixen's story and evokes nature's universal power to heal. Her practice is grounded in a non-documentary approach: the work is less concerned with depicting place than with evoking an emotional and sensory experience of it. 

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