SABINA HANNILA

"These rocks have been standing on the island of Gotland for more than 400 million years, and they'll still be there after you and I have passed on. But even though they seem frozen in time, they change all the time: the wind, sand, and sea affect their physical appearance. This place changed me."

Nattsvammel (Sabina Hannila) is a photographer and retoucher based in Stockholm, Sweden. She has a Bachelor's degree in photography from The University for the Creative Arts (UK) and is currently doing her last semester at The Stockholm School of Photography where she is studying Digital Imaging Processing.

For EVOLVE, Sabina presents her photographic series "Nature as a Sculptor," an ongoing project that started in 2018 when she traveled for the first time to the island of Gotland. Since then, she has traveled to the island multiple times, exploring the different stone structures and creating a geological map of the island. 

To create these images, she uses digital painting techniques to explore what it would look like if one sped up the moment of transformation, pairing it with close-up shots to invite the viewer to take a closer look at the evolutionary process.   Development of these first images has taken three years - the time needed for Hannila’s  artistry to evolve into what is shown in the final imagery.