I’ve been very fortunate with Ghost Trees, or Bardo photographs as I sometimes refer to them. I was in an open state and they rolled in so smoothly. It was in 2022 after my best friend of 30 years died. I was exhausted. That’s the thing I discovered about grief, it’s exhausting. It’s just with you all the time.
The Trees felt as if they had been conjured from darkness and then brought into the light. Looking at the past was still painful, my memories were still of regrets, not the sweet memories that would come later. I was unsure of the present and not at all equipped to consider the future.
Strangely enough, I do believe that it was because I was in this state where nothing made any sense that I was receptive to the images that were streaming into me. I wanted to give Suzanne a beautiful wood to travel through to get her to wherever it was that she was going and I could only do that through photography.
A year later and the visions don’t come to me in such a torrent. They come in slower now, they are more malleable. It took a year to create a foundation on which to work from. A difficult, rocky and painful year creating a woodland for her to walk through.