When I moved from my childhood home to the city, the question of identity in relation to nature became an issue. Nature was significant in my coming of age and defined much of my perception regarding who I am and where I come from. At this stage my connection to nature changed radically - it almost disappeared and this alienation from nature bothered me. I felt that I was no longer an experiencer of nature in nature, but that nature was a space one rarely had the privilege of visiting. Velociraptor Box is concerned with my personal nature experience as well as the personal nature and immediacy of such experiences in general.

When outlining this series, my thoughts returned to my childhood and to a box illustrated with dinosaurs where I preserved paraphernalia that was important at the time: bits of nature such as stones, pine cones, leaves and plants. Velociraptor Box is a series of pictures where the connection with nature is preserved indirectly, as was the case with those important objects. It represents nature both as an idea and concretely through my childhood memories, which allows nature to extend outside the image. In retrospect, I realized that the articles I collected were an attempt to store nature in a confined space with every personal experience related to them. In the series, I photograph nature in a way that it does not become a landscape, in other words, the paramount object of the image. Nature is, however, one the key elements of the image in its quiet, indirect omnipresence.

I wanted to capture the human as anonymous rather than telling something about the subject and her background. I also noticed that I wanted to find myself in the pictures. Man is present in my series, but nature is not merely prop or some "excess" looming in the background. Nature is a parallel world to the portraits, a "portrait" in and of itself. Man and nature are equally important and intertwined. Velociraptor Box shows that man and nature complement each other—not only as a man in nature, but also nature in man.