About Dida…
The only photographs I’ll ever regret are the ones I didn’t take.
I’m Dida. Visual artist, photographer and light painter. And mother of three. I escaped the cold clutches of Norway mid 2005 and found my heart in Australia.
I’ve been a creative for as long as I can remember. My love for photography started in the darkroom in year 7. Shooting on black and white film on a manual camera, then developing and printing everything in the darkness. I loved that darkness. Watching the photographs appear on paper was pure magic. As I grew older I searched for a particular visual aesthetic but struggled to find it. I had a very clear idea of what I was searching for, but none as to where to find it. So I studied various art forms like theatre and film, searching for that particular way of storytelling, but always circled back to photography.
But something wasn’t right.
One very cold November night in Norway life suddenly presented the very best reason to relocate to the other side of the world, and so I moved to Australia a few months later and started my bachelor’s degree in fine art photography the year after. I nudged a bit closer to what I was searching for.
Then one night, in the Australian outback, it all clicked. I had found light painting. And for years that’s all I wanted to do. I finished my bachelor with honors degree specialising in light painting and then completed my Master of Visual Arts, again with a main focus on photography and light painting.
Amidst all this I had children.
Documenting our lives became my main focus once I finished my postgraduate degree with a newborn at my breast and a toddler at my heel. Over the years the photos I took of my family went from being intended as mere snapshots to artworks in their own right. And so I started photographing during daylight as well.