Belle Mélancolie

An exploration of the quiet, dreamlike spaces within the feminine psyche & the inherent sorrow of womanhood. Captured on medium format, these self portraits explore the loneliness & melancholy women are taught to fear, replacing despair with stillness.

Currently under tier 1 global talent sponsorship by the Arts Council England and the UK government for my global contributions to art and culture, I am a visual artist exploring the female psyche and the inherent dichotomy of serenity within despair.

This body of work is an exploration of the quiet, dreamlike spaces that exist within sorrow. Captured on medium format film, these photographs are born from a desire to find stillness and strange beauty in emotions women are taught to fear—death, sadness, loneliness, despair.

Belle Mélancolie is a series of fine art black and white self-portraits exploring the mysterious terrain of feminine emotions — the spaces between solitude, sorrow, and serenity.

In this work, the camera becomes both witness and confessor, tracing the contours of the feminine mystique. These images inhabit a world suspended between wakefulness and reverie, where the natural landscape mirrors the interior landscape of the self — vast, tender, and haunted by silence.

The series seeks to reclaim the melancholy of womanhood from despair, revealing it instead as a site of stillness, reflection, and renewal. Each frame resists the demand for performance or perfection, allowing space for vulnerability to unfold without spectacle.

Through the soft grain and tonal depth of medium format film, Belle Mélancolie becomes less a record of the body and more a meditation on presence — an invocation of the unseen emotional geographies that shape how women move through solitude, longing, and the slow ache of motherhood.