I’ve been looking back on some pieces of writing I did in the summer of 2025. I’ve been thinking about the importance of taking voice notes in my practice as a way of capturing my thinking during making. I realise I haven’t given enough importance to documenting the internal creative process as much as the studio work itself. I now realise how important it is for me to document the internal dialogue in real time, as I make decisions and move through the creative process.
Until I started writing things down about six months ago, it was easy to lose track of different experiments and emerging themes. Writing things down – or as I think of it, trapping ideas between the pages of a book – has let me take a broader view of my practice, take stock, and think about where I want to move next.
This bit of writing began as a voice note while I was taking photographs. Voice notes are great because they quickly capture things in the moment.
I’d just picked an apothecary rose that morning. I brought it inside, out of the wind, and placed it in a small bottle of water. The bottle happened to be an old honey jar.
I started taking photos, but I wasn’t connecting with them. Something felt off. Harris, my three-year-old, was nearby, climbing over things and picking up camera lenses. I was trying to stay present but also move with the moment.
I tipped out the water. What next? I remembered honey from my bees in the next room, so I poured that in instead. And something changed.
I stopped being interested in the rose. I became absorbed in the way sunlight hit the honey through the glass – how it reflected onto the wax paper I’d laid underneath. The light shifted constantly. I had to respond quickly. No overthinking. Just catch it or lose it.
I found some bamboo silk ribbon I’d dyed and dropped it into the honey. It caught the light too. Eventually I pulled it partway out and started photographing the honey sliding across the silk. It was beautiful – the colour, the texture, the unpredictability of it.
At one point, Harris picked up one of my camera lenses and held it to his eye.
He said – “Why have you got little windows?”
And I stopped.
Because the question felt profound.
It reminded me that photography isn’t really about the outer image. Not for me. It’s about the inner dialogue I’m having as I take the photograph.
There’s a quiet searching in me when I’m working – and when something I see in the world suddenly expresses what I feel inside, that’s the moment I press the shutter. That’s the moment of clarity. Sometimes it’s in focus. Sometimes not. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the image holds something true.
What matters is that it says something I couldn’t yet find words for.
And Harris was right – the lens is like a little window. But the camera itself is a vessel. A home for my inner world. It receives my thoughts through my hands – through buttons and focus rings and shifting light – and somehow translates them into something you can see.
That’s the magic of it.
The image might show a flower or some ribbon or a bottle of honey – but if I’m lucky, what it’s really showing you is my experience of looking through the lens.
The stillness. The awe. The sense that something ordinary caught fire for a moment in the sunlight.
And if you see it..really see it – then maybe I’ve managed to show you something that words can’t, through a little window.
Update: Why voice notes matter to my practice, February 2026
I’ve been looking back at this post. The voice notes and the photographs taken that day. At the time taking voice notes seemed like a tool of convenience but actually it was doing something important that I couldn’t have achieved with writing alone.
My practice is mainly working alone in this very rural location, amongst family and work like responsibilities. It’s not happening in a social, studio setting where I can bounce ideas of other people easily, in the moment.
I’ve realised that my making process is all consuming at the time- a totally immersive embodied experience. I’m making decisions, thinking and acting based on sensory inputs, intuition, with my hands, eyes, responding to what’s happening in front of me before I even register the decision consciously.
That’s why voice notes are so important in my practice. I can focus on the physical interaction with materials- pouring honey, moving bottles to catch the light, change the angle of my camera rather than stopping this process dead to write what I’m doing down.
So I’m narrating what I’m doing, decisions, thought processes, reflections and it’s a record of that moment when I’m able to articulate what my body has done moments before. Tacit knowledge described, reflected upon once my mind has had time to articulate a process that doesn’t actually require words.
So the cycle is an embodied making process which I then try to capture and later reflect more deeply upon. Often reflections ripple out long after the making process starts. For me, uncovering meaning in my practice takes much patience and time. My blog is an important reflective surface in my practice. In fact it’s an archive of reflections which is a continuation of the practice itself. It’s a slow, distillation process of making, capture and reflection where each stage brings new layers clarity.