In 2009 I took a photo of a majestic tree with all it’s roots exposed and tangled, spreading across the woodland floor. I thought it beautiful but there was something else about it that stayed with me.
Over the years I’ve taken countless photographs of forests, ancient woodlands and weathered landscapes. Looking back, I realise I kept returning to them because they reflected something I hadn’t yet found in myself.
Stability. A sense of home. Strength. Belonging.
Perhaps that is why the idea of roots has followed me for so long.
I have spent much of my life feeling slightly on the edges, knowing many people, moving between different places and different circles, but rarely experiencing that certainty of this is where I belong.
Cornwall is different. I sometimes joke that I belong here geologically before I belong here socially. There is something in the landscape, the rock, the sea, the weathered trees and wild places, that feels familiar to me in a way I find difficult to explain. I can feel at home in the land even when I am still working out what home means for me.
More recently I have begun to wonder whether finding your place is also connected to finding yourself. There are parts of the life I have lived that don't always feel as though they fit the person I am becoming, or perhaps the person who was there all along. Art and nature have been two of the places where that person has always felt easiest to recognise.
Maybe Earth Root Studio is part of that process too. Not an announcement that I have finally worked everything out, but somewhere to explore the things I keep returning to: art, nature, folklore, creativity, connection and our very human need to belong.
And perhaps creating a place to belong isn't only about finding one for myself. If something I paint, make, find or write makes another person stop for a moment and recognise something of themselves in it, then a connection has been made. And maybe that is where belonging begins.
These roots eventually became far more than a favourite photograph. They became the inspiration behind Earth Root Studio. A place where art, nature and connection grow from the same foundations.
