I've learnt many things over the past three years while closely observing the natural world.
Overcoming limitations has been one teaching that's really stood out to me.
Plantlife thrives in the hardest of circumstances and reaches towards the light in even the darkest of places.
My intention for my 'Relics of a Wild' series from the outset was to place limitations on my creative process, in order to force new artistic growth.
Instead of collecting images for my digital collages from the overwhelming virtual expanse of the internet, I chose to limit the elements I would use in my work to photographs I had personally taken.
I would then place a further limitation on myself and only use natural forms I encountered whilst out walking in nature.
Despite this narrowed focus I had some big plans. This time last year my intention was to visit numerous places, specifically around the Peak District where I now live.
Collecting imagery from a varied array of forests, moorlands, ridges and reservoirs, that the UK's first National Park has to offer.
But with a new job and my baby daughter to look after those plans had to be put aside.
I became limited almost entirely to one location to collect images for my new work.
Many of the images in my new piece 'Wodwo' are from photographs I’ve taken over the past year while walking just one single mile of the Sett Valley Trail, a former railway line now embraced by woodland, near to where I live.
Why here?
Because it's the place I push my daughter in her pram as she takes her afternoon nap.
At first I felt frustrated that I had so little time to go out on long walks in the surrounding hills, and that I was largely restricted to just one small location.
But I slowly realised, after a number of days on the trail, I had everything I needed either side of me.
I didn't need a vast majestic landscape to find amazing images, I could find the same natural beauty down an unassuming woodland trail.
I often come back to Japanese culture for inspiration, so looking to the art of bonsai seems a perfect analogy.
Through limitation and constriction beautiful things can grow and develop.
Humans are part of nature, so it's no different when it comes to the movement of our own lifeforce.
It will twist and turn in our own unique ways given the restrictions in our life circumstances.
In this way it is our limitations, and more importantly how we respond to them, that defines who we are.
The title of this new piece 'Wodwo' is a word derived from Middle English meaning "wild man of the woods".
Originally spelled woodwose or wodewose, this specific spelling of the word comes from the title of a poem by the English poet Ted Hughes.
The poem describes an amorphous being seemingly floating through the natural world, trying to understand both itself and the elements around it.
It perfectly captures the feeling I'm attempting to depict within this series, because it's how I personally feel when I move through nature.
I turn the volume of my civilised rational mind down, allowing the strangeness of the surrounding undulating wild growth and decay to seep into my awareness.
You can read the poem below.
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water. Who am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there's all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here's the water
again very queer but I'll go on looking