This series of photos was created during the winter months in 2025-26, a time when Ireland slips into low light days and long dark nights. It is a stark contrast to the the spring and summer days commonly associated with Ireland, the green fields and wildflowers, bright skies and warmish temperatures. It’s officially spring when you hear the sounds of returning cuckoos and swallows migrating back from South Africa.

Instead, winter is a time of inwardness when the land sleeps, when the greens turn shadowed, the trees have no leaves, the roads are mostly empty, most businesses are closed, thoughts and feelings turn inward, and the clouds hang low and rain. This last winter it rained for 52 days straight, an unusual amount that even the locals remarked about. Yet, it is also an intimate time in Ireland, a time of coming together between the locals, a privacy with the landscape, and a quietness within and without. These photos are reflections of some of those moments, walking the landscape, places of personal retreat, memories.

These photos also capture a time when I personally experienced a challenging medical issue, starting with a late night visit to the emergency room, and ultimately with an operation late January, and follow-on consultations and care. In similar way, I experienced my own internal darkness, asking myself about life values and meanings, finding strengths and accepting weaknesses, becoming more honest, feeling vulnerable, setting boundaries, allowing every emotion to surface into light and slip away into dark, and finally to let go. I walked a lot and this photo documentation sustained me. 

So these photos also reflect that overlay of experience, the weather both inside and out, watching my emotions run wild like the rains and winds, clouds and deep, dark nights. And like the winter in Ireland, I also found hidden surprises within myself revealed by the darker lights and times, those of subtle promises, peace, beliefs and the return of trust within myself. I found in the landscape and natural surroundings, mirrors which reflected both nature and myself, a blending, two reflections as one — staying in the uncomfortableness.  

I hope you enjoy these photographs, and see behind the blacks and grays, the colour and life behind each one is truly there.