I'd been thinking through this idea of ghosts. About how absences in our life follow us around. About how they haunt us, not exclusively with a sense of regret or longing, but also with a gentle, guide-like presence. These presences can change the feeling in a room, get deep into our heads and tell us so much about ourselves. The ghosts are the memories and lessons we learn from things no longer with us. I think about the people I've lost, the family I'll never meet and the paths I've neglected to take.

While working through some other projects around this idea I was directed towards this book, ‘Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination' by Avery Gordon. There's this quote "the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us." It made me think about how these absences deserve our attention. They are entitled to our love and respect as much as anything else.

I've been making field recordings for a while. But I wanted to work on more personal self portraits, using the recordings to capture me as well as spaces, alone in my house or further afield. I wanted to be present in the audio. From this, I started to think about what other presences I'd captured in the recordings, inaudible but there all the same.

With these field recordings, foley, whispers, keys, radio recordings, guitar and kalimba I'm trying to paint around these tiny portraits with colours that I hope represent these spirits, gently observing as I sit in my house, thinking, reading, writing, playing music and whatever else it is I do.

The music, I hope, has a gentle, closeness to it and holds space for these things that we can't see. x