This Place Was a Desert

This Place Was a Desert is part of a practice-led research project investigating the aura of the artist book and how desert landscapes can be translated into book form—both as physical object and emotional space. The work reflects on how arid environments—vast, silent, and often harsh—resonate with internal states of solitude, stillness, disconnection, and slow transformation. Through photography, writing, and handmade book processes, it explores the tension between outer landscape and inner experience, bringing together analogue photography, collage, digital layering, and poetic texts. Most images were made in the Australian desert; others were constructed in the studio to evoke emotional memory or imagined space.