The work here presented, Of Invisible Threads and Nested Time, is part of my ongoing doctoral research at the University of Brighton and is concerned with notions of place and belonging while focusing on contemporary issues of rural landscape and environmental, gendered ideas of nature. Engaging with the English landscape from an outsider’s point of view, the work investigates the dynamics that shape our relationship with place and explores how creative inquiry can—through new aesthetic and philosophical methodologies—prompt new ways of imagining and representing rurality as valuable social and environmental space while reconsidering our relationship to nature.

The work consists of a series of small, monochromatic images taken with a large format camera, hand-printed on traditional silver-halide film and created in response to walking on the paths of the South Downs—in proximity to the places in which I live. Organised in a series of unpopulated landscapes that bear the traces of a long history of human presence, these images form a collection of nature’s fragments that, locating the rural within a local, imaginative landscape, combines individual and collective memory, interior and social spaces. Memory is an essential part of my research and is mediated through specific darkroom strategies that result in a self-reflexive practice that connects meaning to processes.