My documentary practice encompasses a range of approaches, styles and techniques, including abstract landscapes, observational reportage and styled portraits. All are linked by the recurring theme of how people interact with nature and the elements, both physically and emotionally. Whether regarding issues around land ownership, a sense of personal, solitary immersion in nature or a communal response to the places we love and in which we live, I keep coming back to how we relate to the environments we find ourselves in and how they in turn affect us.
ELECTRIC VISIONS
Electric Visions is a personal exploration of my own experience of living with epilepsy, via abstract photography and descriptive writing. 1 in 100 people in the UK lives with epilepsy. There are many very different types of epilepsy and every person is affected in their own individual way. It is highly likely that you know someone with a form of epilepsy that you are unaware of – it is often an unseen disability – yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding and prejudice around it. I have spent my life keeping it quiet to avoid discrimination, but felt compelled to express my experience via my photography in order to raise awareness.
An integral aspect of the process of making this ongoing project is the physicality of it; all images are landscapes shot at twilight with deliberately shaking hands, to mimic the loss of control that epilepsy brings with it. This began as a spontaneous, instinctive experiment when reflecting that as a young teen I stopped taking photographs around the time that I developed epilepsy, as my hands were continually shaky. I wondered what images I might have made with shaking hands.
In relinquishing aspects of my control of the camera and by using it as an extension of my body, I mimic the loss of control that a seizure brings with it. These images are shown as shot in camera – there is no post-production manipulation. I shot them all outside, in nature at twilight, to create hazy dreamscapes that echo the sliding in and out of consciousness that I have experienced around occasions of having a seizure.
I exhibited the above sequence of images at Patriothall Gallery in 2019, as part of the ‘Landmarks’ exhibition with Transient Collective and also in Cambridge St House, Edinburgh. I wrote accompanying pieces of writing to show with the images, see below. I consider the above to be an initial chapter in an ongoing project which I’m continuing to work on. I was interviewed by the Epilepsy Society regarding the project here
ELECTRIC VISIONS CHAPTER 2
I was 6 months pregnant and supposed to be on a ferry to Arran for a peaceful retreat; instead I was in an ambulance, barely conscious, on my way to hospital. I’d had an epileptic seizure for the first time in well over a year. Generally my epilepsy is very well controlled by medication and I’d received great care and monitoring from the NHS throughout my pregnancy. This was, however, the first of several seizures to come during the following two months. My final trimester was a traumatic haze of blue lights, nervous scans, post-seizure confusion, staring at ward ceilings, hospital meals, bruising, anxiety and sudden repeated separation from our three year old daughter.
Thankfully and miraculously our second daughter arrived safely, beautifully and completely healthy. Since then the seizures have stopped.
In the hospital on the day she was born and the evening before, I finally had some unexpected peaceful, slow and creative time. I had brought my camera anticipating making some photographs of my newborn, so was able to make the above series of images (many of which had been in my head for weeks previously) on those monumental days. Continuing my approach from the initial Electric Visions series, with long exposures and deliberately juddery hands, I tried to capture the uneasy, blurry, hazy experience of this uncertain and terrifying time.
IN SACRED MEMORY
‘In Sacred Memory’ is an ongoing series of images observing old, hand-carved stone graves and memorials being overtaken by nature or repurposed into walls, floors, meadows and carparks, in the way of ‘progress’. Treasured memories and traces of relationships are subsumed into the earth – and life goes on.
The final image ‘Dead End’ takes its title from my 3 year old daughter who, when we took a walk in an overgrown Victorian graveyard, used it as her playground and decided she was in a maze. She kept calling out ‘Dead End’ when she got to a grave. She was just using a phrase she’d heard with no concept of its connotations or why it was funny. I’m not sure she had any concept of death yet and her innocence struck me and felt fitting within the context of the new life springing up around and over the graves.
Some of the photographs in this collection were taken in an overgrown churchyard in North East London. There is a well-used short-cut path running through it and it is currently undergoing a community restoration project. Local people are ‘adopting’ and tending the graves, planting flowers and there are guided walks around it. The project is in its early days and the graveyard is large, so there are currently still 100s of untended graves. What could be framed as a melancholy and creepy place felt to me like a space of hope, peace and renewal and a monument to love past and present.
THE GREEN BELT
‘The Green Belt’ is a long term documentary project which looks at the character and ownership of the village / suburb (depends who you talk to!) of Balerno, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. For years it has been surrounded by the supposedly protected Green Belt; forests, paddocks, grazing & agricultural land and it is right on the edge of the popular ‘beauty spot’, the Pentland Hills. Most of the fields ringing Balerno are under threat of having their Green Belt status removed in order to be sold to housing developers – indeed, some already have. This project explores the changing and unchanging aspects of a specific place and the overflow of nature into suburbia and back again. It looks at the environmental impact on wildlife, agriculture and existing communities of property development and questions inadequate infrastructure to support a growing population. I have been working on this project since 2016, documenting the area and its inhabitants through the years, seasons and the building developments.
WHITBY GOTH WEEKEND
