The artist’s book I hide myself within my flower consists of both photographs and text. The photographs depict various plants picked in the meadow and on the hillside of the mountain farm Lii, situated on the far end of the lake Møsvatn, 900 meters above sea level. The texts in the book are fragments of a larger story, memories from Kramer’s past, reactivated in the final months of her mother’s life and during the vigil at her deathbed. Each paragraph is numbered in the same way as the photographs and bear the name of the plants depicted. The book’s design and references bring to mind presentations of flora in botanical books and herbariums. But the images can also be understood with reference to still life genre, especially the vanitas motif, which remind us of the inevitability of death and transience of life.

Through this book project, Kramer has found her personal path into this well-known motif tradition by creating a bond between her family’s farm and her mother’s love for the world of flowers. It is also a record of her own grieving process over the loss of a mother. Thus, the book is about pain and loss, as well as the complex mother-daughter relationship. At the same time, it is about love and not least about life. There is something optimistic about the cycle of plants, the regeneration of life, year after year.

In the handmade cover one finds traces of all the plants that have been photographed. This dimension gives the project a material anchoring in that the flowers are “reborn” and immortalized through the paper. In a way, the memory of her mother, the place and the stories are given further life.

The title of the book is borrowed from the first stanza of a poem by Emily Dickinson from 1859.