If I’m not pottering around in my studio you can find me wandering the north Suffolk coast with my camera and my trusty companion Dolmush, who left behind the streets of Turkey to come and join us. I work almost exclusively with analogue processes, using old, out-of-date film, cheap cameras and homemade filters. I’m not after an exact replica of what I see, but something closer to the sense or feeling of being in a particular place.
I’ve been working on my Doggerland project for a couple of years and it’s still ongoing. I was fascinated by the idea of a vanished land beneath the North Sea, a time when mainland UK was connected to Europe via a land bridge and hunter gatherers roamed the plains looking for bison, mammoth, rhino and straight-tusked elephants.
You can find out more here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
I grew up on this stretch of coast, and it's a fragile, restless place. Every year the sea claims a large chunk, slowly eating its way into the land. How long before this land becomes another lost world again like Doggerland?
To be out here, in what is still quite a remote area, requires surrendering to the elements. There’s often a narrow micro-climate in this space that sits between land and sea, the wind and rain can batter you into a huddle, while just a few meters away it’s calm and sunny. The passage of time here is different too, guided only by the tide and the world seems strange and vulnerable, teetering on the edge and about to be swallowed.
How the prints are made
Once I have my photographs, they go through a slow process of being soaked in tea (a nod to the warm, rust-orange tones of the Norwich Crag formations that run through the cliffs here) and are then dried and sealed. Finally they are given a light coating of cold wax sealant to protect them further.
I often pick up washed up debris from the sea, including pieces of mariner’s rope that I can utilise in the final artwork. Those small strands on each corner of the print are taken from this rope and connected to the boxes as a kind of anchor for the image and a small physical connection to the coast that inspired it.
These are the feelings I try to bring into my photographs: the uncertainty, the quiet drama, the sense of belonging to a place that is never quite the same twice.
