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.


Mature broadleaf woodland meets dense rows of conifers along a muddy, debris-strewn forest track.

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.


Sunlight filters through lichen-covered branches in the shadowed interior of a dense conifer forest.
A narrow path leads through moss-covered conifers towards a small sunlit clearing within the forest.
A single slender tree remains on a clear-felled hillside scattered with branches, stumps and grasses beneath an overcast sky.
Low sunlight filters between closely planted conifers, illuminating patches of green moss across the shadowed forest floor.

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.

A small red-and-white cottage stands beyond a reed-filled pond surrounded by mixed woodland.
Even rows of tall conifers frame a bright clearing at the edge of a managed forest.
A narrow grassy track crosses harvested woodland towards distant houses beneath heavy grey clouds.
A person sits beside a glowing wood-burning stove inside a warmly lit woodland cottage.
A snow-covered road curves through dense conifer forestry at dusk beneath a clear blue sky.

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.

Layered patterns of ice cover a narrow forest drainage channel beside fallen logs and frost-covered grass.
The cut ends of stacked logs reveal rings, cracks and variations in the colour of the timber.
Felled branches and cut timber lie on snow-covered ground among the upright trunks of a conifer plantation.
Bundles of long, stripped wooden poles lean upright against standing trees at the edge of a forest.
A small moon hangs above the dark line of a conifer plantation and a recently cleared forest floor at blue hour.

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.

Black-and-white upward view of tall conifer trunks converging towards an opening in the forest canopy.
Low sunlight passes through widely spaced trees, illuminating long grass and undergrowth on the forest floor.
A red-brown bracket fungus grows from a moss-covered piece of decaying wood.
The exposed roots of a fallen tree rise from a mossy forest floor lightly covered with snow.
A narrow snow-dusted path winds between young conifers and dense green undergrowth.

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.

Elevated view across managed forestry, access roads and clear-felled areas partially obscured by low cloud and mist.

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.




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