The Unicorn

A photographer goes looking for a creature that does not exist. Following traces of the unicorn across cultures and landscapes, she explores the fragile boundary between myth and reality.

We know what the unicorn looks like. This is curious since there has never been one to see.

For centuries, knowledge of unfamiliar animals and distant places depended upon the testimony of others. Travellers returned with accounts of animals they understood as unicorns. It borrowed features from animals that did exist and changed as the stories travelled. The body of a horse or an ass, sometimes white; the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, the beard of a goat. Always the troublesome horn.

Images gave those descriptions bodies. Eventually an animal without a specimen became recognisable on sight. Objects believed to be its horns entered collections and were valued as antidotes. Natural historians classified it among known species. The unicorn travelled this way for two millennia, out of reach, and yet acquiring a remarkably persistent presence in the world.

A unicorn has always existed somewhere between being seen and being told. I began to wonder what happens between an account and an encounter, and what might remain of the unicorn if I went looking.

In the late 13th century, Marco Polo travelled into an unfamiliar world carrying an animal in his imagination. In Sumatra he came across what he called unicorns. They were black, hairy mud-loving creatures with heads like wild boars. He was disappointed. They were not, he wrote, at all as we describe them.

I love his disenchantment, and his insistence on seeing beyond the rhinoceros before him. In August 2025 I began following the unicorn too.

My photographic practice explores the limits of what can be made visible, and how knowledge, belief and visual evidence shape our understanding of the world. The Unicorn grew from these questions and changed my way of working. I begin with a story and allow it to tell me where to go.

In Hungary I found aurochs, animals associated with the Biblical monoceros, sharing a field with Przewalski horses. This requires some explanation, since the last known aurochs died in 1627. The animals stood before me belong to an attempt to breed cattle back towards the appearance of their extinct ancestor. My guide called them aurochs, and for a moment, I was willing to do the same.

Seen in profile, one horn conceals the other. Perspective can readily lead to misidentification, and I can see how an account of a single-horned animal, repeated and illustrated, might gradually be accepted as fact. Things no longer seemed particularly unusual. The distinction between finding, recreating and recognising became unexpectedly slippery.

The search has become less about finding a unicorn than about what happens when an idea meets the world. We rarely arrive at something empty-handed. A name, an image, a story, has often arrived first. In Hong Kong, a master craftsman of ceremonial animal figures, reminded me that the qilin and the unicorn belong to parallel but distinct histories.

Photography ought to make matters simpler. It does not. A photograph does not arrive empty either.  We tend to recognise through what we already know. A caption changes an animal, a sequence changes a photograph. One image can make another appear evidential, improbable or suddenly, familiar. The unicorn remains just beyond the photograph. That is reason enough to keep searching.