The fifth and final photographic print panel I produced for a Yateley Camera Club exhibition, Garden Textures is very much a product of the transitional state I was living through at the time.
I had moved out of the area in summer 2022, but was still commuting back to Yateley for a few days each week, mainly to finish up some projects at my day job and to see out the 2022-2023 camera club season, and most of the images in this panel were shot at my new house, exploring some of the textures of the old trees (both living and dead) which were in the garden. Four of the pictures (I, II, VI and VII) show parts of a six-foot-tall dead trunk which had been left standing, while two (III and V) show some of the extensive lichen cover on the old-breed russet apple at the garden's centre. The only instalment not shot on the property (IV, used at the centre of the panel) is again of lichen, but this time taken at Beaulieu Abbey.
Due to time constraints and the fact that I was feeling run-down at the time, I recycled the mountboards for this panel from my 2022 project Ghosts of the Tide, and was unable to create a second panel despite having signed up to do so; Garden Textures was therefore my only in-competition entry for 2023, and was exhibited alongside an out-of-competition revision of my 2019 entry The Professionals.
Sadly, despite our best efforts to improve its health, the russet apple tree died (from old age, as far as we could make out) over the following winter, and had to be felled in spring 2024 as its core wood was rotting - taking with it the decades of lichen growth which I had tried to capture in these images.
