My photographic practice is concerned with the relationship between time, memory and experience. In an image devoid of cars or technology, the protests continue to highlight the same issues over which our mothers and grandmothers took to the streets: the value of work and fair pay; bodily autonomy and personal safety.
I have made these works to document the state of womanhood in the here and now. I live in London, where the number of feminist protest movements, year on year have declined. Paradoxically, these are urgent times where divisions threaten to further erode our social bonds and our sense of security. I love the energy of the crowd, the anger and the frustrations, the sense that things will get better even when life seems quite absurd.
This lady sat on the steps of the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square and she seemed so defeated. Groups of tourists on other side of her seemed oblivious to the protests raging below, looking at something in the sky that was not there. I had the idea to make a photo-collage, in the Surrealist tradition of Eugène Atget's 1911 Eclipse, a group in the Place de la Bastille gazing up at a solar event which he recorded from a tangential perspective. That is, the eclipse itself was less of an event than the dynamic in the crown. My image was shot in July 2022 on Lady Grey 35mm film, which I scanned as a digital negative, adding my digital images of a lunar eclipse shot in 2018, alongside the image of one of my egg sculptures.
