Artist Statement
I work with photography, haiku and haibun, and field recordings, using walking as my primary way of engaging with place. Moving through a landscape, I respond to what I find using whichever form feels most appropriate. Some experiences are visual, while others are better held in words or sound. Often, it’s a mixture of sensations that reflects how the experience actually unfolds: layered, shifting, and not able to be reduced to a single impression.
My practice adapts to duration. For a short stay, prior research and fresh eyes work together, each sharpening the other. Extended time brings something different. The seven years I spent living in Greenland, where I first started taking my practice seriously, showed me what repetition and seasonal change reveal: how the same path can transform completely between summer and winter while remaining recognisably itself, and how familiarity can deepen perception, provided you continue to pay attention.
No matter how long I’m in a location, I move slowly enough to notice what gives a place its character: the movement of light across a hillside, the changing sounds of ice, or small traces of how people live within a landscape. This is a contemporary ginkō, a walking practice rooted in Japanese tradition, where photography, words, and sound each catch what the others miss.
Underlying this approach is an interest in what lies just beyond description. The Japanese aesthetic of yūgen offers one way of understanding this: a sense of depth that cannot be fully contained in language, image, or experience. Rather than trying to explain a place, I pay attention to how it reveals itself to me and translate that through my work.
Walking creates the conditions for that attention. It slows everything down enough for a landscape to actually reach you, opening a space between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, passing through a place and actually experiencing it. I continue to walk because of what that space makes possible — a quality of presence where the world stops being backdrop and starts revealing its intricate beauty. The Japanese call it ma: not emptiness, but a pause full of potential, the gap where the environment can actually enter. My work grows from that space, and I hope it passes something on: an invitation to get outside, move slowly, and see what unfolds when you do.