Laurence Ellis

Instagram message to Lola, 28th October, 2021

In reply to the idea of having someone edit the text, I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing and how language can be oppressive for many – especially those who didn’t receive a good education (in the traditional sense) or those who work in a second language. It feels restrictive and excluding in a lot of ways.

For this reason, I thought I’d like to keep my bad grammar and spelling mistakes and open with this paragraph.

Maybe one if the reasons I took up photography is that when you haven’t received a traditionally good education (state school in the 90s) writing seems to be off limits. If you don’t know your their from they’re theirs, then it’s instantly ‘wrong’. Photography seemed to have less rules, being wrong was alright. Saying that, please excuse the typos and crap gramma structure, I’d like writing not to be off limits anymore.

Email to Lola, 14th September 2021

Throughout the work there are numerous threads which weave multiple themes, experiences and narratives, both real and imagined. Although, in this moment in time, I’m interested in understanding what seems to permeate beneath. Exploring the subconscious act of making the photographs, an outward representation of a personal inner world.

In Celtic mythology, in-between places were those places of transition, neither one thing, nor the other.
Doorways, shorelines, the forest’s edge, dusk and dawn are a few examples. These were the places of power, where the extra-ordinary was possible, and where the bonds of reality and the every-day were shed.
The experience of being ‘homeless’ at a very young age (my mother and I went into sheltered housing when I was 3 years old and we lived for about a year in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of London) has in some ways informed a feeling which has carried into later life – of never quite being at home in traditional spaces, often finding solace in a state of the in-between. A feeling which I’ve continued to explore as a way of both understanding, healing and sometimes escape from a memory which is both painful and reassuringly familiar.

The communities which my photographs often portray are those on the outskirts. From distant villages in the arctic circle, a utopian city in India, or a remote religious community on small island in Scotland . What they all seem to share is a dialogue with worlds beyond the boundaries of their unique space. They may be removed but they are not isolationist, there is a conversation which occurs with either the outer or inner world. Places of learning, introspection, activism or understanding. Where land, culture and history cannot be untwined.

As much as I desire to be a member of a community or space, I’m also aware that I often have the need to leave, to not conform. To explore and understand the complexities of the spaces which exist in space between, without destination. Understanding the nuanced stories from far away places, brings about an awareness of not just my own experiences but of the collective feelings we all inhabit.

In 2019 I visited the indigenous pipeline resistance camp of the wetsuweten, with the aim of telling the story of the activists there in opposition to ‘Big Oil’. Only after leaving the camp, months later did I understand the story which was central to the community – healing. The Unistoten had a saying, it was written on a board in red paint and one of the first things which greeted you after completing protocol, before entering the camp. It read, “Heal the people, heal the land.” People and land cannot be healed independently, sick people manifest destroyed land and environments. Inversely,  natural habitats which are suffering and depleted cannot sustain healthy life. The understanding that health and healing between land and life cannot be isolated (in fact it is one and the same) has been central to my work ever since.

I visited central Australia in 2020, just before the start of the pandemic. I witnessed the trauma, in both the land almost inhospitable for human life and the faces of the people devoid from the images, echoed in stone. This trauma cut through the generations like the song-lines through the mountains, written in layers of rock and collective consciousness, felt by the soil under our feet.

Along the way I began a conversation with Judy Atkinson, a Jiman (central west Queensland) and Bundjalung (northern New South Wales) woman, who specialised in healing ancestral traumas of her people. She called these wounds, trauma trails, alluding to the ancient songlines which carry the unspoken stories of the indigenous people of Australia.  Through these conversations I became aware of my own ancestral trauma, not so dissimilar to the oppression and vehement cruelty which occurred in Australia – the murder of our grandparents and the theft of their children, who are now our mothers. I understood that the only thing which unites us is the trauma we share and a collective desire to heal. The healing must be universal, as so are we, and the world.

The In-between spaces which punctuate these photographs, are where beauty builds. Free from the boundaries and adrift from conventions, open to explore and find a sense of fleeting belonging. There’s an echo of the divine which ripples through these lands – whether they be ancient dream lands of the indigenous people of Southern Australia, the in-between places which are still understood in the stories handed down by generations of people in remote Scottish islands, or on the sacred banks of the river kai of the Unistoten. A place where the illusion of separation from nature is briefly dispelled and healing can begin.

Laurence Ellis is a photographer; born in London in 1984, he still lives and works in the city.

Ellis studied Social Anthropology before embarking on a career as a photographer, initially assisting Mark Lebon in London. This developed into a long term collaboration, co-hosting several exhibitions together.

Moving back and forth between personal projects and commercial work, Ellis has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. He uses both analogue and digital techniques and enjoys the opportunities for experimentation offered by the darkroom and in post-production.

Over the past 2 years Ellis has worked on several long form photography projects, which include; documenting climate change refugees in the Arctic Circle, Indigenous pipeline protest camps in the Bayous of Louisiana and Northern Canada, alternative mental health communities in rural Scotland and India, and most recently travelling through central/east Africa, South America and Vietnam exploring the importance of Indigenous knowledge in relation to climate change mitigation and sustainability.