I Cling to the Sky

‘I Cling to the Sky’ is an ongoing series of lunar portraits of women deeply rooted in their relationship with land and their places of personal significance. It is about transience, belonging, vulnerability and environmental grief.

Statement

I am an artist-photographer working with experimental analogue photography, interested in liminal states and how they might be captured in a photograph: humans are frozen by photographic exposure in the defencelessness of a free-fall, or fade into rocks and dissolve amongst trailing stars in long exposures.

With light provided only by the moon, my camera has borne witness to the terrifying beauty of nocturnal storms, and to a long line of woman artists, each one in communion with her individual ‘special place’, in nocturnal solitude beneath a turning sky.

The more-than-human-world, and the many strands of human embeddedness within it, have featured in my work since an extended overland trip to the Middle East taught me the value of a life lived in elemental exposure, between Earth and the firmament.

I went on to make a home for a decade within an ancient Devon woodland. At night, while my children slept, I roamed the land with my camera through the shifting seasons and lunar cycles, developing my artistic voice, immersed in the place, the changing light, and a felt sense of ‘seeing and being seen’.

When forced to leave, I came to understand my experience of Solastalgia—the distress caused by environmental displacement—as part of a wider collective condition. It led me to use photography to explore human emotions surrounding ecological loss in my ongoing series of female lunar portraits, 'I Cling to the Sky'.

About the Series

‘I Cling to the Sky’ is an ongoing series of nocturnal landscapes, skyscapes, and female portraits of artists whose practices are deeply rooted in engagement with land, captured by the light of the full moon in forests, on beaches, and across the moors of Devon, UK.

Each portrait is made in a place of personal significance to the subject, tracing both the uniqueness of the individual and her ongoing practice with land—through walking, making, observing, and returning—as well as her connection to a more-than-human community. These images explore narratives of human belonging: how identity is formed and reshaped through sustained relationship with land.

Working with darkness as both medium and collaborator, the series engages a sensorial experience of the natural world. Within the stillness of long exposures, body, place, and perception meet—encounters are held and recorded.

The work reflects on representations of womanhood beyond fixed definitions, situating the body within cycles of nature, time, and transformation. Here, perception is understood as reciprocity—an exchange between the observer and the observed, where presence is shared rather than imposed.

At its core, ‘I Cling to the Sky’ is also an act of recording: a response to environmental fragility, dark skies, and ways of seeing that may soon be lost. It holds space for what is vanishing, while affirming the possibility of connection, attention, and belonging.