Photography
Blue Zone - Akureyri Botanical Garden Series
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The ongoing Blue Zone photography series emerged during my 2022 artist residency in Akureyri, Iceland. During that time, I made it my daily practice, morning and afternoon, to wander through the quiet pathways of the botanical garden and make a conscious effort to pay attention to my breath, thoughts, and surroundings. My breath slowed, my thoughts softened, and color, especially the majestic blue poppies, began to feel like a language of its own. The series borrows its title from my research on “blue zones,” places in the world where people are said to live longer, more connected, and more joyful lives, shaped by everyday rituals of movement, food, and community rather than spectacle or excess. In my Blue Zone photography series, “Blue Zone” becomes a symbol through which the idea of a blissful physical environment drifts away from geography and statistics and moves inward, toward the fragile, fleeting moments when the mind, body, and soul remember to pause and find themselves in a moment of stillness, when a fragment of sky, a cluster of flowers and leaves, or a stray reflection becomes a temporary shelter.
Rather than documenting any specific Blue Zone, this work treats the concept as a symbol for a personal refuge: a self-made interval of slowness, attention, and care that might last an afternoon, a few days, or simply the span of a single breath. Through the images, I invite viewers to consider how a “blue zone” can exist within and around them, in the pauses between daily tasks, in modest gestures of retreat, in the way light falls across a surface and creates a small clearing for reflection. The series asks: What if longevity is not only counted in years, but in how often we allow ourselves to step aside from urgency, to listen, to be still, and to recognize those slow and quiet moments of life as places important and worth returning to, again and again?