Ope

Ope: is an archaic word for opening. It refers to a small coastal inlet, a place that provides safe haven, it also has a double meaning as it suggests an opening psychologically. As I begin to share the feelings surrounding my brothers passing. I find a safe haven on the seashore, inlets and landscapes of Dorset where I can feel close to him beyond death and beyond reality, outside myself once I begin to document.

Ope the images explores the boundaries between spaces, land and sea, as if the distance between realities has a physical boundary you could push against touch, like the film upon the surface of the sea. The hag stone, a means of protection, also offers up a way to penetrate that boundary. In his book Ghost Ways Robert Macfarlane describes his book as, holding a hagstone up to the landscape, and shows the skulls beneath its skin. My camera is like a hag stone that can be held up to the landscape that can disclose my history, how my memories are trodden and ground into those familiar places. I now find solace where once I could not tread as the ghost of memories woven in the very places, I loved unnerved me.

Ope became very limited edition hand made book and was made using simple rough materials hand stitched with images printed on Awagami paper as light and transparent a the liminal barrier .