A house of clay by Erik Gustafsson

The birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom creation and destruction in Gustafsson's expressive monograph.

In A House of Clay, Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a truism of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning and take seriously the smallest of occurrences in ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder toward consciousness, sensing and feeling.

Sometimes excessively normal, elsewhere tender and intimate, later dense and complex, Gustafsson's warm slices of life are digested in the darkroom, where the technical processes of photography fall in on themselves, becoming embedded in the image: cycles of photographing, printing, failing, dodging rules, repeating and scanning.