I grew up on a small rural council estate, on the former site of Hampshire Lunatic Asylum. My parents were practising witches. So, it didn’t seem uncommon to be dragged around sites of paranormal interest, museums about times which no longer exist and landscapes of historical battles. Twenty years ago, they took me to a white witch who read my tarot. He told me things about my future that I would never envision coming true, but I was wrong.

Hauntings started as an exploration to find the witch and have my tarot read again, but what I realised quickly was the familiarity of space and time spent in the area where he resided. It became apparent that as I began the project, many of the sites I had subconsciously started to revisit already existed in the videos and photographs of my childhood, the ones I hold onto as the neutral custodian of a family archive, which otherwise would have been split and dispersed following my parents’ divorce.

I, like many, have spent a lot of time thinking about the past; I recognise there is a sadness for a time that no longer exists, a shared, nostalgic melancholy, experienced generationally and individually through our own experiences. There is, in fact, very little the past can provide; revisiting the sites which remain untouched offered me no physical or emotional ripples to my subconscious. I’m curious as to why I am drawn to the act of looking backwards, what in the original tarot reading has led me here, to be impelled to point an archiving machine, attempting to find traces of moments or feelings.

Patterns began to surface in the photographs made on these journeys, faint correspondences, something beneath consciousness. I returned to the family album to find more patterns, photographs of me, taken by my father, uncannily mirrored in the images I make now, thirty years later. The connections, gestures, repeated structures, the isolation of a singular subject matter, none of it felt coincidental. When I bring our images together, they become timeless; they outlive the moment they depict and reappear wearing a different face. They are as much about the past as they are the present. I am haunted by the temporal persistence of seeing.

Despite looking, I never found the white witch, but on that trip, I had other opportunities for a reading, yet each time, I felt a reluctance to step through the door, a reluctance for a stranger to hand me my next ten years. The excavation of the family archive and the construction of something new only offer more questions with few answers, but maybe there is something in the act of photography and the archive as a form of divination, a way of looking forward through what already was.

Hauntings was made in 2025 as part of a commission for Hapax Magazine and can be purchased here