“Deep inside the interior world of Tereza Zelenkova’s The Essential Solitude, time has ceased to exist. Webs of dust have gathered on unmade beds, folds of black velvet sit decaying and unkept, and mirrors have dulled and faded to darkness. Almost as if set in amber, this strange house is a place of peculiar stillness, save for a single figure who moves imperceptibly through its rooms. A being both male and female, human and creature-like, corporeal and imagined, it haunts the images, casting its black shadow across tapestried walls and never meeting our searching gaze.

Zelenkova made the photographs in this book across several visits to Dennis Severs’ House at 18 Folgate Street, London between 2017 and 2018. Conceived as a time capsule for the preservation of styles from centuries passed, the house was designed as an uncanny theatre, and in it Zelenkova located a place to stage a world of one's own. Somewhere between seeing and feeling, mysticism and truth, dreaming and wakefulness, she invoked her vision for a form of pure solitude – an essential solitude, achieved only through imagination and contemplation, far away from the boundaries of the outside world.”

- Joanna Cresswell