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“Get ready to weep tears of sorrow as bright as the brightest of beads, and like the bright beads you string to wear around your throat at the burial, gather your tears and string them on a thread of your memory to wear around your heart or its shattered fragments will never come whole again.”  Takwena

In the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I walked for an hour each day to photograph the peculiarly painful emotional landscape I had been thrown into as a newly grieving Scottish widow.  Using my husband Fairnie’s medium format Yashica camera loaded with rolls of black and white film,  I produced forty black and white photographs with text each day. This body of work captured my fragile map of pain.

The Yashica’s photographic process shoots images from the gut, and the camera falls heavily on the stomach. My photographer’s eye strained to focus on the world from this unexpected view, and respond from the place where grief settles so uncomfortably in the gut, often referred to as the ‘second brain’.  Daily, a rollercoaster of emotions flooded my senses as the agonising scarring which occurs when death – the final frontier of our humanity – ripped into my physical world and changed everything.