Sea of Stones by Dafna Talmor

Dafna Talmor, a British visual artist, was one of the participants in the Balaton Eye International Art Residency Program in 2023. Her artistic practice is rooted in her fascination with landscape — one of the classical genres of photography. Her approach, however, is anything but traditional and, in fact, defies easy categorisation within the photographic canon. Her works possess a strong contemporary visual presence and aesthetic that are difficult to compare with other current photographic practices.

Since 2009, she has been developing her ongoing project Constructed Landscapes. In this series, she has established a distinctive working method that is, on one hand, deeply rooted in the traditions of analogue photography, while on the other, fundamentally questions them. At the heart of her process lies experimentation with negatives in the darkroom: she cuts and combines different negatives to create new, imagined landscapes. In her most recent works, she goes even further beyond the traditional photographic frame, dividing images into diptychs and triptychs and creating three-dimensional objects.

With Constructed Landscapes, Dafna Talmor pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium — not only through her working process but also through her approach to her main subject, the landscape genre itself. She questions the concept of a single perspective inherent in Western visual conventions and expands the definition of landscape as we have been taught to perceive it. Through the complexity of layering, she creates works that emerge from contrasting extremes, resulting in a rich and multi-layered visual language in which the process is just as important as the final outcome.

During the residency program, Dafna Talmor explored the unique treasures and natural features of the Balaton region, such as the ancient karst reserve in Úrkút, the Római Fürdő in Bakonynána, the nature trails of the Tihany Peninsula, and the basalt organs in Kisapáti and Hegyestű. Drawn by her strong attraction to the photographic depiction of water surfaces and rock formations, she visited numerous basalt formations of the volcanic landscape, its forests interlaced with streams and hidden caves, and, of course, the lake itself. The photographs taken at these locations provided the foundation and inspiration for the works presented in her exhibition Sea of Stones, now shown to the public once again at TOBE Gallery following its debut in Veszprém.

Dafna Talmor is an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer based in London. She is represented by TOBE Gallery in Budapest and Sid Motion Gallery in London. In 2022, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (UK). Her works are held in public collections such as the National Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Deutsche Bank, and Hiscox, as well as in numerous private collections both in Hungary and abroad. Her work has been featured in several publications, including The Women Who Changed Photography (2024), 100 Photographs: From the Collections of the National Trust (2024), Look at This If You Love Great Photography (2021), and Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera (2014). Represented by TOBE Gallery since 2017, her works have been presented at numerous international art fairs such as Vienna Contemporary, MIA Fair, Photo London, UNSEEN Amsterdam, and Paris Photo. *Sea of Stones* marks her third solo exhibition at the gallery.