When my mother was a young girl in Latvia, she was told by a fortune teller that she would cross the sea and marry an Englishman. As unlikely as this seemed to her at the time, it was in fact to be her destiny – in 1944 she, my grandmother and step grandfather fled Latvia to escape the Soviet invasion, eventually settling in Britain after the war. My grandfather, a renowned actor in his home country, remained in Latvia where he lived for his entire life.

These images are a collage of photographs, identity photos and documents, personal letters and effects documenting the life stories of my Latvian family. In the first half of the series are photographs from the Latvian family album portraying life in Latvia till the war turned their world upside down. In the second part, their life in England is shown - from their arrival on these shores up until my mother’s death 10 years ago. 

Life as a refugee in the postwar years seemed bleak – registered as aliens and only allowed to work in certain jobs, my grandmother and grandfather lived in separate male and female camps. My mother trained as a nurse in a TB hospital where she met my father, who was a patient there. They gradually learned English, gained British citizenship and got used to their new identities. For my mother, marriage to her Englishman and family life followed. My grandparents, reunited at last after many years living apart, saved enough money to buy a tiny new bungalow where they quietly spent the rest of their lives. They never returned to Latvia, but there always remained a nostalgia for their old lives – what the Welsh call hiraeth – that deep and melancholy longing for a lost homeland, part memory, part imagination, the fate of the émigré.

See blog pages for further insights into their life in Latvia.

Handmade accordion book of photographic collages displayed in a Latvian silver cigarette case which crossed the sea with them – a tiny part of their life story.

Digital collage of scanned family photographs, identity photos and documents . Displayed as a hand-made artist book printed on archival matte Hahnemühle Rice Paper, image size 2.5 x 4 in, see Books page.

2024

A tribute to my grandmother

Since becoming a grandmother myself I have been thinking a lot about my own grandmother and what the role entails. I was very close to mine when I was a young child, less so in teenage years and later. I wish so much I had asked her more about her life.

When I look through the family albums my favourite photographs of her are the ones taken in the garden. There she is, wearing a succession of printed summer frocks - gardening, feeding the birds and squirrels, hanging out the washing, reading, knitting or sometimes just sitting. The garden seems inextricably bound up with her identity or maybe that’s just how I remember it. Her love of gardening, wildlife, knitting has been passed on through the generations down to me, whether by nurture or nature I don’t know.

As a tribute to my grandmother I have made these images, superimposing pictures of her in her garden over the last 20 years of her life, onto photographs of my own garden, fusing the two into one celebration of life in the garden.

Digital collage of scanned family photographs and my own digital photographs. Printed on archival matte Hahnemühle Rice Paper mounted on brown envelopes, made into seed packets.

2023

This series was made in response to the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Newlyn Society of Artists. Members were asked to submit for exhibition work inspired by past members to mark this milestone in the society’s history. I took as my inspiration Dame Laura Knight’s beautiful paintings of female figures looking out to sea on the Cornish cliffs.

My work is a collaboration with female friends - a mixture of rear view portraits, local coastal landscapes and handwritten quotes about ther hopes and fears for the future.

Digital collage of photographs and scanned text. Printed on archival matte Hahnemühle 290 gsm bamboo paper

2021

Bloodlines is a series of photographs investigating shared familial traits over the generations. Using passport or identity photos the images are constructs of two or more faces from the matrilineal line in my family resulting in an exotic fantasy hybrid linking one generation to the next. The many different permutations I have created serve as a kind of memorial since the female bloodline in my family is now extinguished..... I am the last one left. When looking at the faces individually the similarities may not be immediately apparent, but when layered in this way the resemblances are uncanny. An eyebrow, a nose, the set of the chin, a glance appearing from one generation to the next, linking us to the past and reaching out to the future……

Archival pigment print on Awagami Murakumo Kozo paper, various sizes, displayed in vintage photo frames

2020

A series made in the aftermath of Brexit when I began to re-examine my European roots. As the child of an English father and Latvian mother I was brought up to feel British. My mother did not teach me Latvian so I can neither speak nor read it. Since my mother's death I accumulated all her Latvian paraphernalia – letters, books, photographs, newspaper cuttings. I find myself going through them all, hopelessly searching for some clues to their meaning but it is a closed world to me which I cannot decipher. These images are a way of making my frustration concrete - random extracts from letters, books and papers have been grafted on to my own photographs of the stark Cornish landscape near my home. The incongruous contrast between the two mirrors the internal conflict I feel - half British, half Latvian, now sadly isolated from the rest of Europe.

Digital collage of scanned documents and text and my own photographs. Image size 10 x 10 cm. Printed on archival matt Hahnemühle photo rag 308gms.

2020

Memories of early childhood days are sporadic and hard to pin down. By revisiting my childhood homes and the places featured in family photographs I had hoped my memories would suddenly come flooding back. They proved to be maddeningly elusive. The photographs have become the memories, imprinted on my brain with repeated looking and the retelling of family stories. The memories themselves are locked away like photographs stuffed in a dusty old drawer and forgotten.

Digital collage of scanned family photographs and medium format Holga negatives.  Image size 10 x 10 cm printed on archival matt Innova cotton rag.

2009

As an adult, seeing the world through a child’s eye is difficult. These images of my old childhood haunts, taken with my little plastic Holga camera with its blurry and brightly coloured eye, recreate the dreamlike and slightly disconnected feeling I experienced on returning after all these years.

2009

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory….everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” *

Looking back at the lost world of the family album.

Digital collage of scanned family photographs.

2009

*Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

An accumulation of days: happy days, sad days, quiet moments at home, the unspectacular everyday, the fleeting nuances easily overlooked. Objects are transformed by a shaft of light, views from the window change with the weather, seasonal rituals are repeated yearly. And all the while the days accumulate, time passes…...

2014

My relationship with my home and the landscape surrounding it is complicated and ambivalent. Bound up with memories of family who once lived here and who have now left home or died, there are many associations, both happy and sad.

Continuing on from a previous series The Room, six years later these photographs depict some of the same objects out in the landscape throughout the changing seasons. They are an attempt at making a mark, leaving a trace – a fugitive memorial.

Silver gelatin prints

2013

“In the midst of life we are in death” – the familiar words from the Book of Common Prayer recited at a Christian funeral service remind us of our own mortality. As far as we know, we are the only species which goes through life with the foreknowledge of its own death and the memorial satisfies a basic, universal human need which cuts across all faiths and beliefs – a need to leave a mark as proof of our existence.

Silver gelatin prints

2012

What remains when someone dies? The space they inhabited with their hopes and dreams, the view from their window, their clothes and possessions, the play of light and shadow as the days pass, and precious memories….

Silver gelatin prints

2008

An open window, the remains of a meal, shoes kicked off in a hurry – these are the traces that people leave behind them as they go about their day. But the traces they leave behind as they pass through your life are not so visible ….

Silver gelatin prints

2008