Betwixt & Between
2020 - 2021
“Liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos. A fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to anticipating post-liminal existence”. Victor Turner
‘Betwixt & Between' is a body of work marking the transitional phase of 2020 and my experience of waiting to become a parent.
Having recently moved to the coast at a time when my wife has been pregnant, I have found myself drawn towards images that seem to fall between two worlds as well as to the tides of feeling that my in-between situation has seemed to engender.
This transitional period of being neither here nor there, but always in anticipation of something yet to come, has brought back memories of a recurring nightmare I had as a child of a dark, hairy figure in the distance on the beaches of Suffolk, reminiscent of one of M.R. James’ ghost stories. Recently this otherworldly figure of my past has become increasingly present for me and during my walks along the moonlit beaches and windswept cliff tops, I have felt it there, watching me.
This experience has challenged my thinking around the extent to which certain images of our past might reappear at times of uncertainty. And this has led me to question if unconscious sensation can be made manifest in what we can see or envision, and ultimately what we can photograph. Exploring the unfamiliar terrain of my new coastal home with my camera has enabled me to seek out images of things that seem to hover as if on the edge of something. Uncertain saltwater forms, alien marine life and eerie night-time shoreline shadows, appear in my photographs unaltered and estranged.
This year, for many of us, our experience of time has shifted, and like waves lapping on the shore, our pasts and futures have felt both more present and further away than ever before; boundaries of the real and unreal have blurred and we have all in our own ways, slipped from one domain into another, neither here nor there.
Winner of British Journal of Photography Edition 365 2021