PLACES NOWHERE

Gallery Oldham | 9th December 2023 – 9th March 2024

Places Nowhere was my debut solo exhibition, shown in the town where I was born and raised. It brought together photographs made across Manchester, Blackpool and the United States: streets, buildings and passing figures caught in moments of stillness or transition.

I began taking photography seriously during a period of change in my own life. In 2020, after seventeen years of silence, I told someone that I had experienced childhood sexual abuse. Photography gave me a way to get out into the world, pay attention to it and begin making sense of how I felt. As I travelled, I found myself drawn to places that seemed familiar but distant at the same time.

That feeling gave the exhibition its name. Places Nowhere is rooted in dissociation and describes the experience of being physically present somewhere while feeling detached from it. The photographs show real locations, but the collection is also shaped by memory, isolation and the search for a sense of connection.

Alongside the original photographs, I used Midjourney to create reinterpretations influenced by the stillness and light in Edward Hopper’s paintings. Digital artist Anna Burrows then worked with me to animate some of these images, which visitors could view through the Artivive app. Moving between the photograph and its altered version offered another way to explore the distance between what a place looks like and how it can feel.

Showing this work at Gallery Oldham was an important first step for me as an artist. It brought photographs made during a private period of reflection into a public space, and invited others to find their own meanings in the places I had photographed.