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Getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

Rebecca Solnit 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' 2005

'This question of whether something is fact or fiction
is a reduction of the bookends with which we live our lives'

(Walid Raad 106 Infinity Award)

I have lived in and around Cambridge since I came here as a student in 1972. 'Lost Reflections' includes photography, moving image, sketches, artwork and reflections on social, political and environmental changes over time in Cambridge city and Cambridge suburban Edgelands.

Focusing on particular places and times, the projects explore the multiple layers and perspectives of subjective experience and the creative process of selection and framing particular aspects of reality from the continual flow and combination of realities seen, heard, read and researched.

Tales from the Edge 2023 Degree Portfolio:

Edges of Disruption

Anywhere Road

Plus further development of earlier work

Garden of Mindfulness is the start of a very personal ongoing body of work exploring the process of 'conscious creativity' as a means of slowing my life down in a safe reflective space. Experimental sketches, printmaking and moving image work juxtapose my attempts at mindfulness with dilemmas of managing our often cruel wildlife garden.

Bridge Edgelands is a body of photography-based work about the 'Under World' of the A14 road bridge over the river Cam in Cambridge. It brings together colour and monochrome documentary-style images of human interactions with the built environment and my own framed slices of reflected graffiti to pose questions about beauty and destruction of social edgelands.

Bramblefield Chronicles is a body of documentary and imaginative work about the Bramblefields Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Cambridge.

Reflecting on creative interlinkages and overlaps between multi-layered internal and external 'realities' is my way of clarifying questions and ways of living in a beautiful but confusing and often distressing world. And inviting the viewer to do the same. It is also my way of becoming more aware of inevitably subjective perspectives on 'reality', discovering new ways of seeing things and expressing emotions so they free me to act.

To be added from May 2023:

- Bench - another photobook about the Cambridge River Edgelands

- 'I love Cambridge' sketches, collage and artwork about Cambridge City including new as well as earlier work

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I have lived in and around Cambridge since I came here as a student in 1972. 'Lost Reflections' includes photography, moving image, sketches, artwork and reflections on social, political and environmental changes over time in Cambridge city, Cambridge suburban edgelands and Cambridgeshire Fenlands.

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'Green and Pleasant Land': UK Landscape Documentary

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'Green and Pleasant Land': UK Landscape Documentary

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Social, economic, political and environmental realities of 'Building Back Better', particularly as it relates to farming, land use and ownership, sustainable tourism and  role of outsiders in beautiful areas of the UK.  Although the main focus is documentary and landscape photography, it includes printmaking, sketchbooks and moving image work.

Current portfolios:

Burnt and other Fens
Dark Peak
In Search of the Sublime: Lake District

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Social, economic, political and environmental realities of 'Building Back Better', particularly as it relates to farming, land use and ownership, sustainable tourism and role of outsiders in beautiful areas of the UK. Although the main focus is documentary and landscape photography, it includes printmaking, sketchbooks and moving image work.

Links with UK wildlife and environmental campaigning organisations.

Burnt and other Fens

Littleport

South Holland

Going Back North

Dark Peak : documentary and imaginary work about the Peak District.

Hast Thou Slain the Jabberwock? a re-imagined version of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky about male violence based on photographs and printmaking from Hagg Wood in Holmfirth.

In Search of Sublime : Lake District

Photobooks, documentary and creative work from Ullswater, Derwentwater, Troutbeck and Windermere

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'Green and Pleasant Land': UK Landscape Documentary

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Outsider reflections on social, political and environmental realities of 'Building Back Better', particularly as it relates to sustainable tourism and our role as outsiders in beautiful areas of the UK. The location work includes documentary and landscape photography, imagined narratives, printmaking, sketchbooks and moving image.

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'Tales from the Edge': UK Coastal Narratives

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'Tales from the Edge': UK Coastal Narratives

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Looks at social, political and environmental issues on the UK coast.
Current portfolios include Suffolk and Norfolk Coast and Cornwall.

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East Anglia Coast

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Orford, Suffolk

Norfolk Coast Path

'Colours of Shingle' is a sketchbook project aiming to produce a small book of illustrated eco-poetry about the different dimensions of time and its experience that are experienced in Shingle Street. My sketches and poetry are also heavily influenced by photography experimentation, photo collage and video of walks around the area together with interviews with local people, other people walking along the beach and articles and poems in the local magazine 'Village Voices' as well as other poems and songs about the place. It is part of a substantial and ongoing long-term comparative body of work about the diverse but interlinked communities and environments along the Suffolk coast between Southwold and Felixstowe, including Orford, Aldeburgh and Dunwich and possibly other locations not yet visited, looking at the multiple interactions between these locations and their distinctive 'Southfolk' identity. They are linked by history from prehistoric times and trade with Europe, particularly the Netherlands. The swallowing up of Dunwich by the sea and Orford silting led to the rise of Aldeburgh. The locations are all linked by the Suffolk Coast path and tourist development, the decline of fishing and the work of artists presenting at art and music festivals in Southwold, Aldeburgh and Snape. I started by reading books on the Suffolk coast including Sebald's Rings of Saturn and sections on Suffolk in Daniel Defoe's A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (1724-1727) work by Robert MacFarlane and Stanley Donway on Orford and some You Tube surfing on different locations. I chose to start at Shingle Street because that was an area of the coast I had not been before, and the most remote.

Cornwall Coast

Love and Other islands

A Week in Teetotal Street is a collage of work from a stay in a holiday cottage in St Ives, Cornwall just before Brexit and the 2019 election. The final book juxtaposes personal 'stream of consciousness' photographic and sketchbook reflections with snippets of found text and local news about events and tourism. It is informed by other contextual photograph series, interviews with local people and library and on-line research. It presents a very personal response to my feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness at the time and doubts and dilemmas of trying to be a 'responsible tourist' amid all the social and environmental conflicts in St Ives.

Wheal Dreams

Lost on the Way to Zennor

Forthcoming 2023: Scotland and Northern Isles

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'Tales from the Edge': UK Coastal Narratives

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East Anglia Coast Aldeburgh, Suffolk Orford, Suffolk Norfolk Coast Path 'Colours of Shingle' is a sketchbook project aiming to produce a small book of illustrated eco-poetry about the different dimensions of time and its experience that are experienced in Shingle Street.

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Tales from the Edge: Visual Communications Portfolio 2023

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Tales from the Edge: Visual Communications Portfolio 2023

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Illustrated books and creative photography from the 'edgelands' of Cambridge and Suffolk Coast, UK. Drawing on sketches, video and iPhone and DSLR photography, the psycho-geography projects explore different creative workflows and complex interlinkages between personal 'subjective edges' and 'objective edge' environmental and socio-political documentary. Degree submission for Open College of the Arts BA degree in Visual Communications, Sustaining Your Practice.

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'Tales from the Edge' is a series of visual narrative 'tales' based on experience of 'Edge locations' produced for BA in Visual Communications final module 'Sustaining Your Practice' with Open College of the Arts, UK.

Underpinning all the projects is an interest in conceptual 'edges', the nature of experience and 'reality' and implications for activism to challenge and change social and economic inequalities and human environmental impacts.

In each location I work across different media: documentary and creative photography, sketching, moving image and creative writing in order to investigate multiple perspectives of space and time in each location. I am particularly interested in interlinkages, interferences and tensions between:

- 'stream of consciousness now-time' and documentary: ways of heightening personal experiences of place affecting 'hauntings' from past memories and future visions, hopes and fears merge in our experience of the present.

- 'shifting histories', memory and imagination: ways in which multi-layered and multi-perspectives on physical, social and environmental remembered and re-imagined 'realities' are manipulated for consumption in the present time.

- 'unstable imaginings' of future uncertainties - where alternative potentialities are often shaped and restricted not only by personal experiences, but powerful economic and political forces.

The main focus of the portfolios presented here is on sequential book narratives in photographic media for physical and on-line viewing. But these portfolios are based on supporting work across the different media to produce a more informed and in-depth understanding of place in both subjective and objective terms. My work also explores how the specific aesthetics that can be achieved in different media affect perception, understanding and communication to inspire activism 'to make the world a better place'.

Edge Narratives

Edges of Disrupt ion: Everyday Gremlins is a body of photography, sketchbook and video-based books and images about everyday experience and real and imagined realities in my house and garden.

Edges of Subur bia: Anywhere Road is a series of documentary and creative photography books and digital images about the road where I live.

Edges Found: Aldeburgh Suffolk Coast is a series of photobooks based on found texture and texts in Aldeburgh, a tourist town on the Suffolk Coast. The narratives are also informed by documentary and creative photography around the town.

Edges Shifting : Shingle Street, Suffolk Coast is a body of creative photography, sketches, printmaking and creative writing about Shingle Street, a small row of (now luxury) cottages in a minimalist shingle landscape on the Suffolk Coast.

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'Tales from the Edge': Visual Communications Portfolio 2023

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Illustrated books and creative photography from the 'edgelands' of Cambridge and Suffolk Coast, UK. Drawing on sketches, video and iPhone and DSLR photography, the psycho-geography projects explore different creative workflows and complex interlinkages between personal 'subjective edges' and 'objective edge' environmental and socio-political documentary.

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Journeys as beginnings: Travels of Zemni

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Journeys as beginnings: Travels of Zemni

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Photobooks, documentary and creative photography, artwork and reflections from my travels in Africa, Asia, Americas and continental Europe. These journeys and the photographs I took are only the beginning for subsequent research to better understand the context and meanings of the images both for the people involved and out role as outsiders. Research included interviews and correspondence and/or on-line.

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Inspired by 'Safari as a Way of Life' and 'The Journey is the Destination'
by Dan Eldon whose life was tragically cut short
documenting the life of refugees in Somalia.

But for me the journey is not the destination. Through a long professional research and consultancy career with international development agencies I have never had the opportunity to focus on photography, or even the energy to keep a detailed diary in evenings and weekends around work. What I have are a large archive of snapshots of journeys, dawns and sunsets against a backdrop of knowledge from inspiring local people working in places that few tourists have the opportunity to see.

'Journeys as Beginnings' revisit these places, my memories and occasional notes, reworking, re-contextualising and re-interpreting them as books of photography, collage and illustration in the light of other visual and written information on line together with correspondence with some of the people I worked with.

To inspire with the beauty of some of these places, and activism to address the inequalities that prevent local people from protecting what they value and helping them to realise their visions for the future.

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Journeys as Beginnings: Travels of Zemni

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Photobooks, documentary and creative photography, artwork and reflections from my travels in Africa, Asia, Americas and continental Europe. These journeys and the photographs I took are only the beginning for subsequent research to better understand the context and meanings of the images both for the people involved and out role as outsiders.