In 2025 I was commissioned by Open Doors, Newark, to run 35mm photography workshops with local groups including My Sight; a local visually impaired community. During the workshops participants photographed local landmarks and other subjects they wanted to engage with. The final images I made derive from the photographs taken during the workshops.

This project gave me an opportunity to gain an insight into the lived experience of people facing a range of visual impairments – the challenges they face, the specific optical effects of their conditions, and how this all impacts and shapes their impressions of the world. Due to the way I work with the images, there was no need for the photographs to look a particular way or conform to conventional benchmarks of quality (focus, composition etc). This meant that all participants could enjoy the process fully, without the fear of failure.

The layering process I use produces images that become puzzles to unravel. They complicate our perception of spatial depth. Some subject matter appears out of focus or obscured by abstracted shapes. Our eyes find it difficult to rest as our attention constantly oscillates between the abstract surface and the buried representational content. These characteristics could be said to mirror certain optical effects experienced by people living with macular degeneration, cataracts or other optical nerve disorders. The strange and hallucinatory topographies of these images might communicate the sense of alienation in navigating a world diffracted through the prism of these conditions, and the isolation many live in, as a result.