Over the last year, my conversations about art have increasingly centred on photography and print not just as mediums, but as ways of thinking. Photography, for me, is no longer only about capturing an image; it’s about constructing a visual language. Print has become the place where that language is tested, slowed down, made physical, given weight and surface.
Spending time SNAPES Press with the October Salon Collective, has been transformative. a collective commitment to working with others, to develop community, creating space for shared learning, access, and exchange has reshaped how I understand the arts and the importance of community, especially working together. There’s something powerful about making work alongside others, about the openness of the studio, about seeing processes unfold in real time. It reminds me that art is not made in isolation; it’s formed through dialogue, generosity, and mutual support.
My first year at the Birley artist studios has also been pivotal. The environment at Birley has encouraged experimentation, pushing ideas further, questioning intention, and reflecting more critically on what images do and how they function. Being surrounded by different disciplines, approaches, and conversations has expanded my way of thinking and seeing. It’s made me more attentive not only to subject matter, but to context, structure and space.
Exhibiting as part of October Salon felt like a moment of articulation a point where I moved to sculpture, I put down these strands of photography, print, and put a new idea out into the world. Presenting work in that context sharpened my awareness of audience: how a idea can sit within a room, how scale and placement shift meaning, how viewers move through space and construct their own ideas.
The relationship between SHOP and the people who make up SHOP has also beenignificant in my thinking. Working within spaces has heightened my way of seeing structure. Architecture influences how I frame, how I crop, how I compose. The physicality of print the edge of paper, the pressure of ink, the grain of a surface informs how I shoot. I’m thinking more about form, about repetition, about rhythm within an image.
All of this is shaping my way of seeing and, in turn, my way of making. Photography feels slower now. More deliberate. Print asks for commitment once ink meets paper, a decision has been made. That tension between fluidity and permanence continues to push my practice forward.
Working with others through community, education, and exhibition has expanded not just what I make, but how I understand the act of making itself. It has grounded my practice in conversation, material, and place. And in doing so, it continues to open new ways of seeing.
