Still Formation

A world accumulates, image by image. Still Formation draws on eight years of closely photographing landscape as a site of continual transformation, worked through darkroom prints, photopolymer etchings and mordançage prints.

Still Formation draws on eight years of photographing landscape and constructed forms through close observation. The project sets out to unsettle how we see the physical world, and to find a way of looking that considers it as something both ancient and actively forming.

I came to this through being in places where I found my sense of scale and time start to slip. The landscape could feel animate and unpredictable, alive to the smallest fluctuation in light; it could feel vast, strange and slightly threatening. I wanted my photographs to hold that experience of physical sensation and ambiguity. The closer I’ve studied landscapes and its forms through photography, the more drawn I’ve become to moments that are visually evasive and unplaceable. In that uncertainty, human scale and knowledge stop being the measure of things.

I brought this dual approach of intimate detail and ambiguity into my method. Everything is photographed straight, but often framed so that scale and location are hard to read, and the distinction between the vast and the microscopic is blurred. Openings and voids recur throughout as thresholds, alluding to what can’t be seen. Human traces appear as fragments absorbed into the landscape, and natural and constructed forms echo one another in a shared vocabulary.

The title holds this double sense of time and meaning. Still as unmoving, and also not yet. Formation as a geological term, and as something in the process of taking shape.

The printing methods also extend the study of materiality. The project brings together colour darkroom prints, photopolymer etchings and mordançage prints. For the etchings, images are exposed onto light-sensitive photopolymer plates, then inked and pressed into paper. Some of the iridescent metal printing plates are included in the project, doubling as image and relic. I also began working with mordançage, which chemically lifts the emulsion from the paper - in these prints, the surface itself becomes unstable, echoing the landscapes they show.

Still Formation is an ongoing body of work and was presented as a solo show at 10 14 Gallery, London (June–September 2026).