When I was a kid I loved to draw. I used to think I wasn’t very good at it, because my likenesses never looked the way they were meant to and the things I tried to draw from my imagination never turned out how I wanted. But no matter how disappointed I was by my creations, I never stopped creating them because to create is something I have always needed to and continue to need to do. So I drew, I sketched, I scribbled and painted, I shaded and printed and traced and blended and even though I enjoyed it, I couldn’t ever find a method I that truly gave form to the ideas in my mind, that could crystallise my memory to keep it from fading away, or to tell the stories that I could find no describe. I tried writing, and making music, I studied art history and textiles and finally learned how to actually draw something that looked ‘right’. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

And then I got a camera.

And I can still remember planning the first picture that I wanted to take with it, in Blackpool, beneath a pier to photograph the crisscrossing, rusty, structural beams and their shadows falling in dark stripes on the pale, damp sand. I remember visiting the spot on the cold December trip we took at Christmas once a year, I remember the dog that chased us on the beach and our car breaking down on the side of the motorway and the totally ridiculous skirt I wore trying to impress my then boyfriend and now husband. And I remember shooting that first frame, and guarding that precious camera and it’s even more precious contents, wondering if I’d even got my exposures right enough for it to turn out, or maybe I would mess up the developing and destroy the thing entirely. But I didn’t. And while I watched the perfectly contrasted lines bloom upon the red lit paper, engulfed by the smell of chemicals that still feel like home to me, that I knew I’d found the vehicle I needed to take the parts of my soul that so desperately wanted to be seen, and make them live. It was like magic.

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