Echoes of Childhood

There is a particular weight to finding a toy in an abandoned room. Not heavy in the hands — most of them weigh almost nothing — but heavy in the chest. A bear with one eye. A wooden horse with the paint worn from where small fingers gripped it. A book left open, face-down, as though the reader only stepped away for a moment and somehow never returned. You stand there and the silence changes around you. It is no longer simply quiet. It is a specific kind of quiet — the kind that belongs to a life that was once loud with play, and isn't anymore.

These are not photographs of toys. They are photographs of time. Of the strange loyalty objects show to moments that have long since ended. A child grows up, grows old, disappears entirely from the place where these things were left — and yet the things remain. Patient. Waiting, in the way objects wait, which is to say without any waiting at all.

I have found these objects in forgotten houses, in attic rooms sealed for decades, in the dusty corners of spaces that were cleared of almost everything except the things no one could quite bring themselves to move. Some belonged to strangers. Some, unexpectedly, belonged to me. That discovery — the moment when a familiar shape appears in an unfamiliar place, and you recognise it before you understand what you are recognising — is the feeling this entire collection was built around. The emotional weight of objects left behind is something I have returned to throughout my work, but here it is at its most unguarded. Childhood does not leave gently. It leaves its things scattered, and goes.

What I am drawn to is not sentimentality. Sentimentality would be too easy, and too dishonest. What I am drawn to is the gap — the distance between the object and the child who held it, between what something once meant and what it means now to find it gathering dust in a room that smells of plaster and old wood and the particular stillness of decades. That gap is where the image lives. That gap is what the camera is for. You can read more about this particular pull — why certain spaces refuse to let you go — in my essay on what draws me there.

These photographs settle into a space quietly. They do not announce themselves. They ask to be lived with — returned to at different hours, in different light, when the mood is right and the room is still. The kind of image that rewards the second look, and the third. That changes slightly depending on what you brought into the room with you that day.

Each work in this collection is a limited edition fine art print, produced on premium cotton rag and issued with a certificate of authenticity. Editions of five. When they are gone, they are gone — which feels, in the context of this collection, exactly as it should be.