Borrowed Ground

Borrowed Ground is a photographic project exploring the uneasy relationship between the built environment and the natural world.

Before our cities, roads and railways, there were forests, rivers and meadows. These landscapes existed long before us and will continue, in one form or another, long after we have gone. The ground on which we build is not truly ours; it is only borrowed for a time.  The city is not separate from nature; it is nature temporarily rearranged.

Made using double exposures on 35mm film, the work brings together fragments of the natural world with the structures we have built upon it. Urban spaces and landscapes occupy the same frame, allowing traces of one to emerge through the other. 

The analogue process introduces an element of chance. Exposures overlap imperfectly, alignments shift, and unexpected relationships emerge between the two images. Rather than being constructed and pre-visualised,  these encounters emerge through happenstance within the camera itself, producing photographs that are sometimes dreamlike, sometimes disquieting, but always rooted in the tension between human occupation and the enduring presence of the natural world.