Gertrud’s Gaze

Portraits of girls and women looking straight at you are a recurring motif in Daniels’ project – and it is a conscious choice.

“This gaze is really fitting for this project, because in a way we all intellectually know that we’re not looking at Gertrud, but we want to imagine that it could be her. So I wanted to play with that, to create a multitude of faces, because we are all her.”

Daniels combines a multitude of archival and contemporary portraits of girls. They represent the absent gaze of Gertrud and activates a core quality of photography: to travel back in time. It creates a mirroring effect and paves a path for us to reconnect with history and a sense of collective identity with Gertrud and her time. Daniels’ staged photographs of Gertrud in the work claim resurrection and emphasize a sense of unity and sisterhood, inviting us to reflect on and resist injustices and discriminations across time.

A mirror for contemporary society

Daniels’ work unpacks how communities react under pressure and uncertainty, and how individuals like Gertrud became vessels for broader societal tensions where cycles of fear, repression, and social fracture thrived – mechanisms that persist today.

“Humans have a tendency to forget. The witch hunts happened 400 years ago, yet the same cycles keep repeating. Cycles of fear, hardship, the need to find someone to blame. Communities turn on those in the periphery or who challenge the norm. And it’s the same today. History offers us distance, perspective, and a chance to see these patterns more clearly. That’s the joy of hindsight.”

Through this perspective, Gertrud also becomes a mirror for contemporary society, illustrating how suspicion can harden into violence and how social divisions into “us” and “them” continue to ripple through our cultures, politics, and human impulses.

Reawakening the sisterhood of Älvdalen

Gertrud was sparked by the artist’s interest in revisiting tales of local history and myths from the Älvdalen region told by her grandparents . Her family is deeply rooted in the region, and some of her ancestors were among those who were  accused and  executed during the witch trials.

She researched the intricate historical and cultural layers of Älvdalen, its forests and pastures, and found that women often spent long periods living deep inside the forests, far away from society. There, they learned about  plant medicine and acquired survival skills that gave them an autonomy that  ultimately were perceived as threatening.

“Women gained independence and authority and knowledge while living in the forest pastures. I think parts of that  is  interesting to reawaken. I’m not saying that this is a life to return to, but to consider what happens when behaviours that challenge the norm are repressed. My work highlights notions of a strong female-centred culture we’ve forgotten, and asks what it might mean if parts of it came back.”

Gertrud is therefore retold through a practice of photographic, talismanic enchantments and interventions in the forestscape where the strong, female-centred culture used to thrive.

Photography as mythmaking

The enchanted images in Gertrud move fluidly between the real and the imagined, a visual continuity that collapses past and present. Daniels argues that photography operates similarly to the intangible space of “myth”. It gestures and suggests, pointing toward meanings and offering representations that can always be shaped or manipulated. As a tool of myth-making, photography shapes narratives that stay open and unresolved, transgressing historical hierarchies of time and chronology.

Interwoven with Daniels’ contemporary photographs are original historical photographs from the regional archive of Tenn Lars Persson, a local inventor and photographer working a hundred years prior. Blending archival and contemporary imagery, Daniels builds another layer to the narrative and questions what is historical, what is imagined, and who owns the right to write history. The archive, she says, carries a kind of documentary stamp, a truth claim, that needs to be scrutinised.

Reenchanting our narratives

Daniels’ practice seeks to restore a sense of wonder and possibility to a world she sees as increasingly disenchanted.

“I’m bringing Gertrud’s destiny to the present through photography. I’m imagining it as if it’s in the now. That’s a surreal thing in and of itself, but I’m doing it because I want to make a point about  time being cyclical, that Gertrud’s destiny is still affecting us today. To remystify the rituals in the forest, to infuse them with some contemporary magic – I believe that’s something we crave today. There’s this lack of hope, a lack of imagination, and I feel that dreaming and imagining are essential for us.”

The blurred boundary between truth and reality in Gertrud creates a magical space where myth and history coexist and where more hopeful understandings of our contemporary time can grow. The project reminds us that history is not just something that once was. It is an inherent part of us and our narratives that can bring new perspectives to our understanding of contemporary challenges.