The meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella

This series of photogravures and prints traces the arc of fully hand-crafted image-making, from the alchemy of light on film to the tactile depth of the print on Somerset paper. The processes reveal not just an image, but the ghost of its becoming. The grain becomes texture, shadows become etchings, silver becomes memory. Within this handmade framework unfolds a theatre of mystery. Figures caught in poses that hover between reverie and performance, objects plucked from dreams, garments that may be costume and skin at once. The compositions evoke the chance encounters and disquieting beauty that Comte de Lautréamont likened to “the meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. They lean into the absurd yet elegant juxtapositions of surrealism. Each frame becomes a room in an uncharted hotel, its doors half-open to scenes both intimate and impossible. Time folds in on itself – the image is neither of the past nor the present, but a suspended moment. The viewer wanders as a guest might, moving from shadow to glare, from whispers to silence, collecting fragments of a story that can never be told in full.