These maps are part of an ongoing response to precarity faced by refugees and people in transit attempting to reach places of safety. They were created following five years of work with people in transit in Northern France, often working with the cyanotype process that seemed to embody, conceptually, many of the journeys that people had undergone in their search for a safe place to be. This series. consisting of 8 maps were made on beaches in France, Scotland and Greece, using shells and wet sand, exposed in situ and washed out in the sea. Four parallel pieces, Digital Shadows were shown in Calais: witness to the Jungle (2019) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and are now in the permanent collection for Experimental Photography. This image features in Hoxton MiniPress monograph This Pleasant Land (2022).

The cyanotype process, also known as blueprint or sunprint, was discovered in the 1830’s and was the first photographic process that could fix an image to a substrate and maintain itself when exposed to light outside of the darkroom. The process involves coating substrate in photosensitive chemicals, using sunlight to expose and the water to fix the image: an alchemical process relating to transformed states.