The photobook as a physical site for a regenerative relationship with the environment

This practice-based research project will set out to explore regenerative design principles within the making of
photographic work and photobooks. The research will situate this subject within a wider framework of
philosophical and environmental thinking, and of the physical making of books. The project will involve the
creation of my own small scale publishing projects, as well as the collaborative development of a book with an
industry partner to explore how these ideas can be taken forwards within a larger scale commercial publishing
framework.
Sustainability has been at the forefront of my research and artistic practice for more than 6 years. Sustainable
book making is not just about selecting the right paper or printer, although of course these choices are important.
It's about relearning the way that we think about the process from start to finish. It's about what you put in your
backpack when you go out into the world, what camera you take with you, how the photographs made will find
their way off the memory card and into the physical world. We need to radically rethink all of these points in the
creation and dissemination of photographic work. And this need to rethink is only becoming more and more
urgent as the photobook publishing world continues to grow.
My own photographic work is made in the landscape: on foot, carrying my own shelter, and leaving no trace. I
walk in the landscape for up to a week at a time, alone and self-sufficient, open to what may come from these
encounters. These experiences have fundamentally changed my relationship with the world and with people and
have made me more conscious than ever of the need to ask questions about how science and society have
shaped our rules of engagement with the non-human world. When I began to make books of this work in 2016, I
began to question how I could continue this dialogue with the environment. There is a conscious smallness to
my own publishing both in the physical size of the books and the edition sizes, which have ranged from 35-120
books. I assemble and bind all of the books by hand. This process makes me very aware of the nature of the
materials I am working with, and the waste produced through the making process. I have published three small
size limited edition books: Born of the Purest Parents (2018), a research into the landscape, cultural history and
science of salt, this is how the earth must see itself (2021), where the Ordnance Survey mapping system and
symbols were used as a guide to explore the British landscape, and Scale & Substance (2022) which presented a
combination of manuals for making and unmaking books alongside texts that probed the Western desire for
dominance over and control of the natural world. The latter book reused by-products, test prints and material
offcuts from the associated exhibition to create unique printed matter.
I am presently developing my next project, about map lichen, or to use their Linnaean Latin name, Rhizocarpon
Geographicum. As a symbiotic ecosystem, lichen is a fitting subject matter for exploring regenerative principles,
and this work will form the starting point for the practice-based research undertaken as part of this project. I will
be returning repeatedly to three sites in the UK; Lands End, Dartmoor, and the Cairngorms, to spend time with the
lichen and to understand their territory. The name 'map lichen' comes from their growth pattern on rocks, where
the colonies are outlined by black spores, making them appear like borders on human made maps. The project
involves walking and fieldwork much like my last two bodies of work, and in parallel I will spend time in the lichen
collection at the Natural History Museum, London, where I will work alongside the Lichenology curators to
understand these organisms and the assembly of their collection