Portals, 2025
‘Portals’ is a project that grew out of time spent exploring Neolithic sites across Scotland. The exhibition brings together both photographic prints and monolithic sculptures, all shaped by my experiences in these ancient landscapes.
During my visits, I collected natural materials – barn owl pellets, hagstones, water – and infused them into the sculptures. Each material carries its own narrative and history, linking the sculptures directly to the land they came from.
For me, these ancient landscapes act as portals – not only through time and space, but also into the memory and presence held within the land itself. I was thinking a lot about how time accumulates in a place: geological time, human time, ritual time, and personal time all layering to form a kind of palimpsest. The outer world leaves its mark on our inner lives, and I’m drawn to how the environments we move through shape who we become.
My process begins with being in the landscape, without a fixed intention. I spend time walking, observing, and listening, allowing the environment to guide my response. Often, I will sit with a site for hours before making any images, allowing a sense of the place – and the unseen forces at play there – to settle in. When I make a photograph I try to trace both presence and absence. Photography becomes a way of uncovering the layers of a place, its silences and hidden narratives.
The title ‘Portals’ speaks to many of these ideas – thresholds between past and present, between inner and outer worlds, between what is seen and what is sensed.
‘Portals’ is a project that grew out of time spent exploring Neolithic sites across Scotland. The exhibition brings together both photographic prints and monolithic sculptures, all shaped by my experiences in these ancient landscapes.
During my visits, I collected natural materials – barn owl pellets, hagstones, water – and infused them into the sculptures. Each material carries its own narrative and history, linking the sculptures directly to the land they came from.
For me, these ancient landscapes act as portals – not only through time and space, but also into the memory and presence held within the land itself. I was thinking a lot about how time accumulates in a place: geological time, human time, ritual time, and personal time all layering to form a kind of palimpsest. The outer world leaves its mark on our inner lives, and I’m drawn to how the environments we move through shape who we become.
My process begins with being in the landscape, without a fixed intention. I spend time walking, observing, and listening, allowing the environment to guide my response. Often, I will sit with a site for hours before making any images, allowing a sense of the place – and the unseen forces at play there – to settle in. When I make a photograph I try to trace both presence and absence. Photography becomes a way of uncovering the layers of a place, its silences and hidden narratives.
The title ‘Portals’ speaks to many of these ideas – thresholds between past and present, between inner and outer worlds, between what is seen and what is sensed.