This work explores the idea that notions of beauty and our understanding of landscape are constructed, and in doing so they subvert the notion of beauty as truth, and reference wider issues of authenticity within photography. The intention is to request a more personal response to the landscape, an experience embedded in memory, history, storytelling and folk law to engage the viewer in a dialogue with the image and in a sense of the familiar, drawing on an awareness of how our perception of the natural world is shaped. This series is made in remote areas of The New Forest and Dartmoor, far from pathways and seldom visited by the public. Venturing deeper inside the tree-line the wind and the temperature drop as the visitor is drawn inside the seductive forest interior. From an early age the notion of the forest is given a sinister and threatening personality in the form of fairy tales and children's stories, stepping inside the dense forest feels like entering another world. These sensory experiences often lead to the forest being user as metaphor; the wild and impenetrable has long symbolized the dark, hidden world of the unconscious. Ongoing debates surrounding landscape examine the consequences of conceiving of landscape as beautiful. This construction obscures the reality of the land, veiling it, reducing the natural world to an idealization. The golden tree, sparkling with a seductive opulent sheen alludes to this construction, whilst also evoking a sense of the fairytale. These magical, fantasy trees reference the fictions which persist in spite of any conscious knowledge about the material, social or political status of landscapes, to create rural myth and romanticism, obscuring an understanding of the land as threatened and exploited, dangerous and unknown.

Throughout the history of landscape painting the natural world has been invested with complex themes and metaphors that obscure and overlay the landscape with additional meaning, directly reflecting the preoccupations and anxieties of the culture they were produced in. The notion of landscape can be viewed as a cultural fiction that emerges as a product of a wider cultural imaginary. This is exemplified by the way America has projected its ideological preoccupations onto the American landscape, and then used that landscape to construct a sense of identity. One of the many fictions built around landscape is the dichotomy of beauty and danger; the fabrication of landscape as safe and beautiful masking the reality of the natural world as dangerous and threatening, in an attempt to control and harness it. The constructed landscapes in this series draw on these wider cultural understandings of landscape, combined with personal memory and imagination, to give form to fictitious scenes which reflect the strangeness and dislocation that are associated with night time woodlands. A single light source bathes the previously hidden landscape in an unreal glow, casting the scene as an alluring in-between Island in which night time anxieties and imaginings play out. In occupying this narrow gap between reality and the cultural imaginary they encourage the viewer to impose their own narratives on these ficticous spaces. By responding to something that is unreal the viewer may reclaim the personal in their experience of the landscape.

The forests depicted in my work are those of the imagination, residual traces of real places amalgamated into single scenes by the passing of time. Exploring the fine line between reality and a constructed visual fantasy they draw on the strangeness that lies beneath the surface of the commonplace. The dark and shadowed spaces lure and repel the imagination of the viewer, as the woodland becomes a world of psychological uncertainty. The brightly lit foregrounds of each image are soothing and accessible but beyond these and divided from them by flimsy fences or boundaries are the dark voids of the forest interiors, reflecting the undertones of danger and anxiety that thread through adult life. The juxtaposition of safe and unsafe plays out in the way that spaces are characterized as light, safe and beautiful, or dark and unsafe, alluring yet dangerous, and addresses this dichotomy within concepts of beauty and pleasure. The long format of the images emphasizes the boundary line, the delineation between inside and outside, welcome and unwelcome, light and shadowed darkness, beauty and danger. Laden with anticipation and curiosity these forest-scapes draw on a more naive and fundamental perception of beauty, imbued with latent meaning, potentiality and expectation, whilst the tenuous and fragile nature of each boundary disrupts the status of a clear delineation between the actual and the virtual. These images are made by moving the camera and tripod sideways in increments along a linear trajectory creating a series of images of the scene. These are blended together to form a seamless single frame that contains multiple perspective viewpoints. This constructed experience of the landscape does not describe the forest as appears in real life, it is an imagination, reflecting the notion that the work is concerned with a landscape of unseen but perceived potentiality.

The forests depicted in my work are those of the imagination, residual traces of real places amalgamated into single scenes by the passing of time. Exploring the fine line between reality and a constructed visual fantasy they draw on the strangeness that lies beneath the surface of the commonplace. The dark and shadowed spaces lure and repel the imagination of the viewer, as the woodland becomes a world of psychological uncertainty. The brightly lit foregrounds of each image are soothing and accessible but beyond these and divided from them by flimsy fences or boundaries are the dark voids of the forest interiors, reflecting the undertones of danger and anxiety that thread through adult life. The juxtaposition of safe and unsafe plays out in the way that spaces are characterized as light, safe and beautiful, or dark and unsafe, alluring yet dangerous, and addresses this dichotomy within concepts of beauty and pleasure. The long format of the images emphasizes the boundary line, the delineation between inside and outside, welcome and unwelcome, light and shadowed darkness, beauty and danger. Laden with anticipation and curiosity these forest-scapes draw on a more naive and fundamental perception of beauty, imbued with latent meaning, potentiality and expectation, whilst the tenuous and fragile nature of each boundary disrupts the status of a clear delineation between the actual and the virtual. These images are made by moving the camera and tripod sideways in increments along a linear trajectory creating a series of images of the scene. These are blended together to form a seamless single frame that contains multiple perspective viewpoints. This constructed experience of the landscape does not describe the forest as appears in real life, it is an imagination, reflecting the notion that the work is concerned with a landscape of unseen but perceived potentiality.