Of Earth and Ether: Women Among Mountains invites you to celebrate the tenacity and achievements of women as they conquer the peaks. Each of these women were approached and invited to participate on the mountain, their windswept, and triumphant beauty a testament to their success. I would like this work to highlight and celebrate those successes.

These images have been created using a multitude of different media, firstly the portraits were taken using a medium format film camera. The negatives were then scanned into a computer, before being rendered in silver using a Victorian technique known as wet plate collodion, and then the separates plates were finally combined to create these sculptural photographs. As a very tactile and practical person, I prefer to work with analogue and alternative processes, my interests lie with the physicality of photography, treating the images in this way exaggerates the physical aspects of the photograph.

Each portrait has been split into 13 plates, symbolising the intersectionality of the women photographed. The number 13 has many different connotations, and it is as infamous as it is ambiguous. Synonymous with luck the world wide, some people think it is and omen of good luck some people think it is very bad luck. It has associations with religions and with the occult. But it is also considered to be feminine, tying to women’s menstrual cycles and feminine goddesses, it appears throughout nature in Fibonacci sequences and lunar cycles, tying it beautifully to this project, like the number 13, women across the globe have historically been considered bad luck and ostracised simply for being, perhaps it is now time to reclaim not only the number 13, but ourselves as women.

I delight in the flaws which are inevitable in the wet plate process, believing that they like my subject are completely unique and irreplicable.