Themes
These categories offer different routes through my photographs. A work can appear in more than one place. Each route brings together images and the stories, materials or encounters through which I understand them.
Fantasy and Myth
People I know sometimes appear as nymphs, ancestors or comic magicians. An ordinary street becomes a forest from a story. These associations often arrive when I look at the photographs afterwards; they become part of how I understand the encounter.
Light changes the surface of a body. Colour unsettles the scale of a tree. Two people invent a pose that makes them look like one creature. The imagined world grows out of what happened in front of the camera and what I later recognise in the image.
Inherited Taste and Pleasure
Roses, pink and ornamental excess carry the visual world of my family into my photographs. I return to pleasures I once distrusted, following how a colour or decoration changes my affection for an image. The humour and the pleasure matter in their own right.
A rose crossing an eye can make a portrait feel more beautiful to me. Pink can change my feeling towards an industrial street. Looking through the archive now, I can give more attention to the younger person who made these choices and to the taste she was developing.
Post-Soviet Rupture and Generations
My parents and grandmothers lived through the end of the Soviet world differently. My parents began building a business; my grandmothers struggled with the change. Photographing older people in Britain later made me reconsider the picture of ageing I had carried from childhood.
In the photographs of Marika, an older model appears among the furniture of our apartment in York. The encounter brought back memories of my grandmothers while opening other possibilities for how a later part of life might feel. The historical connection belongs to my memories and the comparisons I make.
Sexuality and Access
Nudity changes what a photographic encounter seems to ask of me. A model can agree to be photographed while I still wonder whether I can give enough back through the work. My experience on both sides of the camera shapes how I think about this exchange.
Agreement, reciprocity and my own confidence are distinct parts of that situation. Stories about a pose, an invitation or a decision help me describe what each person contributed. The visible body remains part of a life that extends beyond the photograph.
Closeness and Possession
I can want intense closeness with someone without wanting to know every detail of their life. That desire can include a wish to possess them. Bodies meet and their outlines merge in these photographs, while each person continues to have a separate life.
The closeness is real, even when my understanding is partial. A photograph can hold the wish to merge alongside the limits of what I know or want to find out. I return to that unresolved relationship between desire, knowledge and another person’s independence.
Portrait and Partial Knowledge
A double profile, a disappearing face or a surface of light records one way a person appeared during a meeting. Looking back at these images, I also notice how much confidence I can place in a partial view, and how another encounter can change it.
The question includes my own habits of attention. Dim-Sightedness gives this a name: I can become familiar with a route or a person and assume I understand more than I do. A later story, another image or an unexpected detail can reopen that view. This is one of the main threads running through my practice.
Home and Traces of Earlier Lives
In our York apartment, objects remained from my husband’s earlier life. I photographed other people among them, arranging bodies, furniture and the spaces between them. A new encounter entered a room that already carried a history, while small correspondences of shape and colour held the composition together.
The exercise machine and a picture of boats belonged to him. By the time I photographed there, the apartment had begun to feel impersonal. These remaining objects connect the temporary presence of a model to a stage of our family life that was coming to an end.
Place and Belonging
My husband and I travel through the same place with different histories. In Acid Abersoch Aberdaren, roads, beaches and houses become unfamiliar through colour. Making these photographs, and returning over the years, helps me build my own relationship with a place that already belongs to his family story.
Familiar daily actions give me a foothold in a wider environment I know less well. Photography becomes another repeated action through which a place gradually starts to feel like mine. The change takes time, alongside the actual journeys and experiences we share.
Mortality and Aliveness
A street transformed into an imagined forest leads me towards the possibility of other realities. Elsewhere, a kiss makes the present feel intensely alive. These particular photographs connect my fear of ceasing to exist with the pleasure of being here.
This meaning emerges through the stories attached to particular images. An imagined world offers a way to think beyond what I can see, while a bodily encounter concentrates my attention on the life happening now.