Coedwig Taf Fechan / Artist’s Book, 2026
Coedwig Taf Fechan is a handmade artist’s book developed from photographs taken during my walks through the forest in Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales.
The book explores my continuing interest in forests as complex networks, structures formed roots, branches, fungi, soil, other organisms, and the relationships between them. Within this system, I began to consider my own presence too: initially as an observer, but inevitably also as a participant.
Photography became a way of bringing fragments of the forest back with me. I selected individual views, structures and encounters from a much larger landscape and, through the construction of the book, brought them together into a new, enclosed narrative.
The photographs are cut, divided, layered and reconnected across pages. Hand stitching moves through images and paper, sometimes continuing an existing branch or line, sometimes crossing the physical boundary of a page. A recurring red thread introduces a human trace into the predominantly monochromatic landscape, a continuation of the Red Line developed in my earlier work The Shelter.
The book itself becomes another network. Images connect across pages; lines disappear and re-emerge; different papers, drawings and photographic fragments overlap. Turning the pages gradually reveals relationships that cannot be seen when the book is closed.
Entirely handmade and hand-bound using exposed stitching, Coedwig Taf Fechan exists as a unique book object rather than a reproduction of a photographic series. The photographs originate in the forest, but their relationships, and the narrative they form, were constructed afterwards, through making.
