Artist Statement

It is a pleasure to create beautiful capsule’s of time, to pour imagination and life’s most profound teachings into a photograph. To save time so that others may share in the story, the awe, the magnitude of your feelings that emerge in a universal, visual language.

To explore the other has been core to my enchantment with the world. It is whilst travelling in other cultures that I feel most at peace.The obligations and pressures of western society seem to fade and an understanding of the simplicity of happiness emerges.
Being welcomed into a strangers home in a new country and being treated as family really makes it so astoundingly clear that there is no difference, no truth in borders or restrictions to class, gender, disability or ethnicity. It makes the beauty of human nature so profoundly clear.

The body of work I called ‘Heroine’, which re-imagines the lives of historical Monarchs, created a shift in the evolution of my work. The women's stories were have been hidden from history, manipulated and disregarded by colonial powers and men who sought their stature.
I think it is important to send the message of these innovative, immensely powerful women; early feminists who stood up and fought for what they believed in to move closer to equality. Equally, we can find a piece of our own stories woven into the tapestry of theirs, of our collective experiences.

My life as a woman and now as a mother myself, relentlessly proves how entangled and inseperable our experiences and stories are and the pain it causes when they are unseen and ignored.

On my journey in South Africa creating'Heroine' I met with contemporary female advocates of gender equality in South Africa, who have suffered domestic violence. They helped me to begin the process of my own healing and for this I am forever grateful. Once again photography opened a door, let me confide in people who I might not have otherwise befriended and have the most meaningful encounters. Here my hypothesis was proven, the more we share experiences, the more empowered we are, the less power they have over us.

‘Mothers’ in an organic progression of my work with women. Created before I became a mother, I was truly inspired by the ineffable love of my own mother and women I met through research for ‘Heroine’. Half of humankind will be a mother at sometime, in some way, during their life. It really dawned on me how normal yet unimaginably exquisite the journey of Motherhood is and how little I knew about other womens experiences, the unfathamoble magic, love and devotion of pregnancy, birth and motherhood. I wish everyone could see this.

 After the most empowering experience of carrying and birthing my own child, a truly ecstatic and peaceful free birth, I have realised how rare it is for women to be supported to birth this way, impacted by society and medical systems. It is now part of my lifes work to help change this. 

Most recently, and really as an extension of my work celebrating the idea of the feminine, I have begun to loosely translate my interpretation of female archetypes & legends throughout time. As we step in to a very uncertain time where our environment is rapidly changing I find myself and the women around me longing to re-identify with their wild inner-nature, that seems to have been lost with the fertile land of this planet.