INHERITED DISTANCE

Inherited Distance 2025

By returning to a state of questioning and confronting the autopilot of life has revealed surprising truths that invite new ways of seeing and understanding.

This work is rooted in my fractured connection to my family’s heritage in the industrial north of England. Growing up, I absorbed fragments, half-told stories, fleeting visits resulting in incomplete memories. But as I get older, I feel a need to explore this disconnect, not to bridge it completely but to make sense of what remains and what it means to me now.

This series captures that tension between memory and disconnection, between the conscious and the subconscious. It embraces duality. Each image is layered, what the camera sees directly is sharp and deliberate, a representation of objective time, a snapshot of the measurable and knowable. But by positioning a carefully selected piece of glass in front of the lens, I invite chance into the process. This glass reflects and refracts unpredictably, distorting and changing parts of the image, creating a second plane of random uncontrolled marks. These interruptions evoke lived experience, what French philosopher Henri Bergson called la durée, or ‘duration.’

Bergson suggested time is not simply linear but layered and refracted. Moments blur and intertwine, shaping the way we experience life. In this work, I lean into that idea, seeking to capture how memories, histories, and emotions coexist, how they resist clarity and refuse to stay fixed.

This series is as much about discovery as it is about documentation. It’s an acknowledgment that I can’t go back, but in accepting that, I can find meaning in the spaces between, where memory bends, refracts, and takes new shape.