Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to where you are now.
I am an English photographer who specialises in pregnancy/motherhood photography. I have an amazing partner and I am a mother to three beautiful children.
I was born into a very creative, colourful and chaotic family in London, but grew up in Kent, where I went to a Steiner school in the countryside. When I was thirteen, I moved to the south of France, to a 17th century old watermill in the Pyrenees mountains. It had no running water, heating or electricity. Just me and my mother. She used to cut down wood with a chainsaw for the fire, and wash our clothes in the stream. The water in the stream would sometimes flood right up into the house, taking our belongings (and once our dog Merlin!) with it – the stories I have from living there are completely unforgettable and feel like a surreal dream. After a few years of attending a French state school, which was full of academia and concrete, I realised that, as I had learned to speak French fluently, there was nothing left for me in rural France, so I did my GCSEs by a correspondence course and applied to go to art college back in England. However, during my exams and just before my sixteenth birthday, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Despite this sudden shocking reality, she insisted that I still go to art college, where I graduated after two years with my BTEC in Art and Design and then went on to do a degree at The London College of Fashion where I studied Fashion Styling and Photography. Then, on a hot summer's day in June, after years of immense courage, strength, healing, searching and determination, my mother died. I was in my final year of studying, and I had just turned twenty-one. It was a moment that completely changed my life forever.
Despite her death, and while navigating the world with my new lifelong friend named ‘Grief’, I managed to complete my degree and began to travel. India, Indonesia, France, Morocco, America – I took her ashes with me and spread them all over. I threw some out of a moving train in India and did a ceremony with a Balinese priest in Bali. These moments in honour of my mother and her spontaneous spirit were monumental for my healing.
After years of travelling and searching – not only for my mother, but also I now realise, for myself – I settled back in London and started experimenting more with photography. I knew that I wanted to do something meaningful, but I could never quite figure out what that could be, as it also had to have the prospect of making money too. My sister-in-law, and soon after, a close friend, became pregnant and they both asked me if I would photograph them. This is when the seed was planted.
Then, almost five years ago now, I met my partner Laurie, who already had two small children – Bart, who was three, and Summer, who was one. Their biological mother had died from cancer too. The journey we have all been on as a family has been just as colourful and chaotic as the family I was born into. It’s been challenging, heart expanding, triggering, blending and full of love. A cosmic coincidence: Laurie and I went to the same art college, but we never spoke, not once. We were in the same year, and I do remember him, like a warm, blurry figure in the far distance, but our paths never crossed back then. The timing wasn’t right. Now here we are, almost a decade later, the five of us. Bart and Summer asked if they could call me mummy just as I fell pregnant with my son, Phoenix, so I became a mother before I had even given birth. Life, as always, takes many unexpected turns.
We are currently moving to a house deep in the forest in East Sussex, which feels like a coming home of sorts. It's an isolated, strange little house – down a dirt track, which echoes sentiments and memories of the mill in the rural south of France. Our children now all go to a Steiner school too.
