Adriatic Coast of Italy, June 2025
35mm film
This work was made on the Adriatic coast of Italy during a period of upheaval and uncertainty.
After losing my UK visa, I also lost my home, the routines I had built, and my sense of what would come next. My future with my partner, Paola, had become undefined. We moved to the Italian coast to buy time and remain together.
In this temporary place, I began making photographs with Paola. The series developed from a simple image I had imagined: carrying a bouquet into the sea. Over several days, we returned to the water with the same flowers, allowing the conditions, our bodies, and the gradual changes in the bouquet to shape what followed.
The work is accompanied by a poem written by Paola in response to the photographs and our experience of that period:
The water pulled us in,
cold and unsteady.
Still we held the flowers high,
keeping them safe from the tide.
Drifting in the blue,
scattered across the sands.
Exhausted yet steady,
we endured the salt in our wounds.
When the waves pressed over us,
we pushed through the negative.
Lifting what was precious,
beyond the storm’s reach.
And though the tide kept rising,
we rose with it.
Our love carried above the water,
a quiet strength refusing to let go.