The Cornish word, hyreth has no direct equivalent in English, its meaning might be translated as something like ‘a nostalgic homesickness’ or ‘a longing to return to a place that is impossible to reach’.

This work can be read as a fragmented coming-of-age story depicting formative events from my childhood and adolescence in rural Cornwall. Using the places where these events happened as settings the images recall and re-imagine memories that seem to be held as much in the landscape as the mind.

Using in-camera interventions to create a sense of strangeness, ambiguity and theatre, the images play with the subjectivity of memory and the tendency towards elaboration, embroidery and self-mythologising. In a reference to the illustration plates of old children’s books the images are titled with short texts that seem to be excerpts from an incomplete narrative.

While the events behind Hyreth are acutely and sometimes painfully personal, the imagery evokes the universal experiences of growing up. The nostalgia at the heart of the work extends beyond a single childhood into cultural histories of innocence and experience, and a shared longing for a time and place in harmony with nature.

In this way the work reflects contemporary anxieties about the state of nature, mass extinction and ecosystem collapse. In Hyreth the natural world becomes a remembered place, loaded with meaning but disconnected from the present and imperfectly preserved as a record of something lost and mourned.

Above all Hyreth invites us to consider the geographical and emotional location of memory, how our histories shape our identity, and whether the past is a place to which we can ever return or from which we can ever escape.