Beyond The Edge /
Beyond The Edge began unexpectedly one New Year’s morning when a thunderstorm drifted in over breakfast.
Coffee in hand, I felt ready for whatever the year might bring, so on impulse I grabbed my camera, jumped in the car, and followed the storm.
Growing up in Scotland, I was surrounded by dramatic landscapes – hills, depth and weather that had weight. By contrast, walking the fields around my home in East Anglia can sometimes feel quiet, flat and familiar. But from the car, something shifts. The landscape becomes fleeting, cinematic and emotionally charged. The sky opens, the weather performs, and moments appear and vanish before I can quite hold onto them.
This project lives in that space: the outskirts, edges and in-between places where the ordinary world briefly becomes extraordinary. It sits at that point where visibility falters, certainty slips, and the landscape feels both intimate and unknowable. It’s less about grand scenery and more about glimpses – those nearly-missed fragments of beauty that slip past and stay with you.
In East Anglia, the vast flat land allows the sky to dominate, turning every change in weather into theatre. Photographing through rain-streaked windscreens, with reflections and fragments of the car creeping into frame, isn’t a flaw – it’s part of the atmosphere. The car becomes a kind of shelter and viewing box, holding me warm inside while the world outside churns, breathes and moves.
Those moments take me back to childhood: long winter journeys through Scottish rain, wrapped in blankets in the back seat while darkness pressed in. That memory – comfort against uncertainty – quietly underpins the work.
Centred within seven miles of Thaxted, my medieval market town in North Essex, the project moves through the villages between Saffron Walden and Dunmow. It’s a landscape that feels both ordinary and timeless; familiar, yet filled with sudden drama when the weather turns.
The photographs are made quickly, often at the edge of available light, when attention sharpens and certainty drops away.
Ultimately, Beyond The Edge stays with those moments where place, weather and memory briefly align — finding meaning in the unremarkable, and beauty in what sits just beyond reach.
