My research and creative interests currently focus on how humans conceive of and engage with the natural world, specifically with the growing mainstream awareness of the concept of plant intelligence. I am particularly interested in how issues of plant intelligence might be properly incorporated into artistic practice insofar as the plant subject becomes an active agent in the process of art-making.
As a practice-based PhD student in photography at the University of Brighton, these interests extend further into how photographic practice and plants both rely on the "transformative qualities of light" to exist, suggesting a poetic and practical synergy between them. Using both experimental and traditional photographic methods my research examines how the incorporation of oak tree material (such as leaves, bark and soil) within the image-making process can create images of plants that are simultaneously made of and with them. By inviting the oak trees into the process of their own representation through the introduction of organic material, the resulting images generate new forms of creative and philosophical engagement with plants that consider their identities as more than mere backdrops to the activities of human life, but also as independent agents separate from them.
Other interests include gender and queer theory, particularly in relation to aspects of rurality and the countryside, and the research discipline of queer ecology.