Wet and wild

Somehow it is April and I’ve been busy working on 3 shows. This year I’ve been up and down to Sheffield a couple of times (thank you Fronteer gallery for including my kale lumen in Tiny Plants - it’s now off to Photofusion), the Dulwich Heritage Cheese Gallery have been wonderful (and I’m taking part in a ‘meet the artist’ afternoon coming up soon), I’ve walked through wild winds and mud with small people for miles (hurray for their energy and love of the outdoors), and I’ve enjoyed exquisite exhibitions. My creative journal is slowly filling up and I’m well stocked in expired photographic paper. The solstice solargraph was a dissapointment but you can’t win them all.

Kings Cross

Polaroid, Saul Leiter show

Solstice Solargraph

Tidesdale, early morning

Green house

Cold morning

Brixton

Lumen

Kale Lumen

Mum and bay leaves

SLG meeting

Photopolymer, Ashdown forest

A night by the Thames

A day in the studio

Abbey Road, Studio 3

Kosmo Mono

This beautiful Kosmo Mono 100 film . Thanks to my friend Leonie.

Roof in the Rosemary

One week can change your life, your outlook, the way that you feel and the way that you look. I’ll be feeling this moment for years to come. For now I’ll call it Roof in the Rosemary.

2018 photography review

I’ve come to look forward to my annual year in review. I’m not much of a blogger but the odd scraps I write up here are getting a bit better. My website has had a little face-lift too with the addition of a ‘places’ section and a general tidy up.

Last year I wrote that I’d be scaling things back in 2018 which is funny now that I think about it. I’ve packed in more this year than I ever have before. I knew I had to focus on other things, but the universe didn’t really agree with those plans.

Some of the things I’ve been up to, in no particular order…

I exhibited six times. Four times with Shutter Hub (The Shutter Hub Open at 5&33 in Amsterdam and Truman Brewey in London, Because We Can at Festival Pil’ours in France and Girl Town Tel Aviv, at Alfred Gallery in Tel Aviv), a co-headline exhibition called Dino Island and The Lake with Nik Strangelove and at the British Museum Staff Art Show. I was also featured at FIX Photo Festival at Menier Gallery
I moved house and couldn’t stop photographing it
The super hard-working power house Karen Harvey of Shutter Hub asked me to curate an exhibition called Out of the Ordinary which is on until the end of January
I was 2nd in the judges vote for Women of the Year at FIX Photo Festival
I went to Italy to do a little photography work, and onto Zurich after that to photograph a party
Lomography gave me a Diana 120 to test
I pitched an idea to a magazine, they said yes, and it’ll be published in February 2019.
I’ve just finished working on something with Stylus Boy
I was fortunate to be on the long list of nomations for the Hundred Heroines

One of the non-photography projects I’ve worked on this year has been a pre-requisite for getting to the next stage of something really huge. I’ve gone back chronologically and written, in great detail, about every significant moment in my life and how it made me feel. Doing this kind of work would feel really self-indulgent if not for the fact that someone, in a very professional capacity, needed me to do it. This coincided with winning a place on a cross-boundary leadership programme. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, I can assure you that I didn’t think it would be mine either. Both of these non-photography related things have been really magical in ways that I hadn’t expected. 2017 closed a few doors for me, but this year they swung back open again.

There are a couple of things in my notebook for 2019. Let’s see what happens.

These photographs are some of my favourites taken with Olympus Pen EE2, Canon AE-1 and Diana 120. Go here for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

Green House, Kew

Snow day, Bloomsbury

Rusty Laptop, Crystal Palace

Women, Bloomsbury

Home

Kathryn, Barbican

Somewhere in south London

Bus window, London

Birds, Glasgow

Plastic, York

Cricket ground, Grantham

Favourite rose

Chelsea Physic Garden

R

Green House, Kew

Birthday, London

Pops, Nottingham

No 3, Brixton

Olympus Pen, London

Pear drop

South London Botanical Institute

Leo, Grantham

Crystal Palace lake

Ferns, Arran

A Tuscan adventure

Recently I was on a train bound for a northern city in Italy . People were boarding like they were on a Ryan Air flight, desperate to cram their suitcases into whatever space they could. They stood in the aisles and muttered to one another in tense and tired tones. At one stage the train stopped inside a long, dark tunnel and the lights went out. Heat began to rise and I forced myself to take deeper, slower breathes. The train would start moving again and the lights would come on soon, surely.

By this point I’d been in Italy for 6 days. It may have been September but the heat was still pounding the low 30s and I’d been bitten by mosquitos almost 50 times. On day 3 I had started to sleep more soundly than I had for a while. It was probably all the cycling I’d been doing through Tuscany. It was as idylic as it sounds and worth every mosquito bite.

I’d been out of sorts for a few weeks. Books, music, gardening and walking were not really helping. During the tense, dark moment on the train I had just about enough time to have a stern word with myself. What was wrong with me? <edit a month later: I figured out what was wrong but that’s a whole other adventure>.

A year ago I decided I really wanted to go to Norway but for some reason found myself in Italy. This, of course, was no hardship. I casually discussed Italy with an Italian colleague and then found myself going to her neck of the Tuscan woods, doing photography work at an Air B&B in Torre del Lago. A later blog post on that will follow.

I don’t normally travel with my heavier camera gear but this gave me a good reason. I had a job to do. I could take as many pictures as I wanted of the apartment, Torre del Lago and the places I visited from that base including Lucca and Florence. I also traveled up to Como via Milan and then onto Zurich to celebrate another landmark birthday (and to photograph that too). This was a lot of travel so I packed lightly and made sure I could cycle with my camera gear.

All was well until I lost my Olympus Pen EE-2, gifted only two weeks before on my birthday. Foolishly it had dangled from my handlebar. Foolishly I had only shot one roll through it. I was so angry with myself and didn’t talk for hours.

I took around 850 photographs on my trip. I was surprised to take so many. There are around a roll of film’s worth of photographs I’d like to keep, but the rest don’t really do very much for me. I found myself pining for film the entire time, wishing I’d packed differently and mourning the loss of my Olympus Pen EE-2 hard.

When I finally came back from my trip (with the mandatory flu caught on the plane home, which I still have 2 weeks later), I found myself back in waiting rooms with surgeons deciding what they’re going to do to me. There will be a bit more of that going on it seems. I am not fed up, nor do I have post-holiday blues, but it’s been an interesting time of reflection. A lot of clearing out.

There’s a lot of good stuff though. More writing, books through the post (thank you Hannah!), trees through the post (I love you CB), a friend on my doorstep with a plant and in need of a cuppa. And a staggering evening watching Kathryn Joseph. We hugged, chatted a little, she made me blush and wrote me a love note. A perfectly timed tonic.

There is also the fact I am helping out and taking part with the Shutter Hub Open at Truman Brewery for East London International Photography Festival which is going to be brilliant. I’m exhibiting at the British Museum staff art show and I am curating something for Shutter Hub at Bridewell Theatre. I am ridiculously excited about that. More posts about this soon.