Living Grain / Lasting Timber
Ireland & Sweden · ongoing · developed through repeated field visits across managed woodland and commercial forestry .
Living Grain / Lasting Timber is an ongoing photographic enquiry into managed woodland, commercial forestry, and the lived experience of forest landscapes across Ireland and Sweden.
Developed through repeated encounters and periods of close proximity, the work considers woodland not as an isolated natural environment but as a landscape shaped simultaneously by growth, extraction, labour, infrastructure, habitation, and time.
The photographs move between plantation interiors, felled timber, access roads, seasonal change, domestic thresholds, and moments in which the managed forest becomes part of everyday life.
Prolonged proximity changed the way the forest was perceived. What had first appeared as landscape gradually became an environment read through small shifts in weather, sound, movement, routine, and repeated passage.
Periods of living within managed woodland in both Sweden and Ireland have shaped the development of this work. In Sweden, the forest was part of the immediate domestic environment: a landscape lived through daily, walked, observed and experienced across seasonal change. In Ireland, that relationship has become more immediate again, with home, access, forestry infrastructure and proposed felling becoming part of everyday life.
The two settings are different, but together they have shifted forestry from a distant subject into a lived condition — something encountered from inside as much as observed from outside.
Repeated encounters with plantation forestry, felling, drainage, storm damage, and regeneration shaped an ongoing enquiry into what happens when a living ecosystem is simultaneously treated as habitat, infrastructure, and resource.
Across the project, woodland also operates psychologically and symbolically. Periods of living within plantation landscapes have coincided with instability, adaptation and the recognition that familiar patterns can shift beyond the point of return.
The managed forest becomes both material landscape and internal structure: something ordered, repeated and apparently stable, yet capable of sudden disturbance and irreversible change.
The work asks what it means to recognise that a landscape - external or internal - has changed, and how we learn to move through what comes next.
Selected images, image sequences, and wider unpublished archive material are available for editorial, publishing, institutional, and selected commercial licensing. Please get in touch with details of the intended use, territory, duration, and image requirements for availability and a tailored quote.
The archive extends across Ireland and Sweden and includes further studies of plantation interiors, felling, timber, seasonal change, domestic proximity, infrastructure and the lived experience of managed woodland.
Open to selected editorial, publishing, licensing, speaking, and collaborative enquiries.
Licensing, Editorial & Collaboration Enquiries
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