A Recipe for Rasberry Jam

A Recipe for Raspberry Jam is a multigenerational project. My maternal grandmother died when I was twenty two but even now I ask for her guidance. If one thing could sum up everything that my grandmother meant to me perhaps I would choose her recipe for raspberry jam.  Folded into that one simple bit of paper are a thousand memories of all the ways that she kind and nurturing. Of her fierce intelligence. Of her extraordinary memory that I wish I had inherited. Of her incredible skills to make and create almost anything from wedding dresses for most of the women in the family, to interior furnishings for my dolls house. She was independent, strong and resourceful. She, like her daughter, my mother, taught me so much about how to be in the world. And what am I passing onto my daughter now?

What do women inherit through the female line and how does it shape our lives? I wanted to celebrate my own mum and the women in our family tree, as well as the women in our circle of family of friends that I grew up with. They were mothers of young children in a generation which still took charge of just about every aspect of domestic life. Each of them were amazing role models because they were present and nurturing while also running their own businesses in pottery, painting, marbling, farming, bottany, teaching and textiles. 

These photographs are portraits of these women, photographs of the worlds they created and raised us in; the pieces of their lives that made them, and which in turn shaped our generation. All these set within the landscape of southern England.

I have yet to photograph my generation…the daughters of these mothers…and their daughters. That part will be coming…