This is my series of work, Ophelia’s Garden. It was a series that I started at the beginning of COVID really when I started to explore still life work. It’s something that I taught myself—spending as much time as we were at home, I moved my photography inside to a studio.

One of the things that I was finding really constraining about my still lives was the inability to get real movement in them, so what I did was moved the still life underwater. I set up a fish tank, I fill it with water, and then I do the still life arrangement in the water and then photograph through the water. This gave them a sense of movement and life, it allowed the fabrics to actually move and float, and also gave sort of a 3 dimensional sense that you don’t get when you are creating a still life normally with photography. So I’m really pleased and excited with the way this has come together to create a still life with movement and depth.

The real inspiration that brought this work together was Ophelia from ‘Hamlet’. I really wanted to spend some time exploring all the emotion, the love, the loss that went underneath and into her story. It was really brought to life, I think, in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings around Ophelia, so what I wanted to do was use that as my inspiration and jumping off point and then explore the themes of love, loss, emotion through my artwork.

So all of the titles of the work are different versions of the words love and emotion but importantly they all represent something really special or significant about the image themselves. For example there’s one image called ‘Fairy Tale; and the roses that I use in that are called Fairy Tale Queen, so it kind of picks up on the thematic of Ophelia’s Garden, but also brings to life the flowers themselves and the meaning they have.