Transparent plastic cucumber wrappers assume protection and fear: perhaps of contamination, the germ spread of unclean hands, or the natural processes of decay. Growers and retailers have historically defended shrink-wrapping as a necessary procedure, focusing on the moisture loss and safer transportation for this fruit which contains over 90% water.

I found these barriers to be an access point to the cultural discomforts of perishability, exposure, and to the growing dilemmas of food distribution. With a prioritisation of protection in shelf life over flavour, mass production over nutrition - the global food system exerts dichotomies of abundance and waste.

Over the course of 6-10 months, I gathered these typically discarded materials from cucumbers I purchased, alongside donations from friends, online call-outs, and market stall holders in Hatton Garden. Each wrapper was exchanged for a photogram copy of itself, chosen by the donor and created as a reciprocal token for their gesture.

I sometimes choose not to work with a camera, and utilise physical objects in the darkroom where association is anew and physicality is inverted - through direct contact with light on paper. This collection of photograms have been made with a found roll of expired photo paper; and with incremental shifts in the colour enlargers settings in the darkroom;going through a colour gradient of what could mean fresh to rotten in the lifecycle of a cucumber.

SKINS are a series of photograms, a camera-lesss photographic technique where physical objects are placed directly onto photosensitive material and are exposed to light. This technique is as old as photography itself, with objects’placement on photographic paper form life-size documents of themselves in negative form.