Project Statements

To remember, recollect, think of, bear in mind

Over 900 NHS staff and care workers lost their lives to the Coronavirus while caring for the ones we love. Key workers risked, and continue to risk, their lives daily to protect others.

This body of work serves as a memorial to those who have sacrificed so much on the front line, and as a visual reminder for future generations not to forget them. The images stand as quiet records of loss, honouring individuals who gave their lives to keep us safe. They speak to us, hold us accountable, and invite us to reflect on our shared vulnerability and mortality. When we die, we all return to nature.

Created during the Covid-19 lockdown, the work reflects the collective experience of isolation, grief, anxiety and uncertainty. At the same time, it acknowledges the stillness, silence and strange dissonance of a spring filled with beautiful weather. The sunshine brought comfort for some, yet clashed with the darkness of the unfolding crisis, creating a disorienting emotional landscape.

The images were made using the chlorophyll process, a technique that relies on intense natural light to burn images directly into leaves. Each photograph was exposed for days or weeks, allowing nature to imprint a fading, ghostly presence onto the leaf surface. These fragile, living portraits carry a haunting sense of loss, echoing the impermanence of life and the quiet resilience of memory.

Lost Objects and Time is a Machine

Lost Objects and Time Machine are two interconnected works that examine the ways in which we confront, obscure and ritualise death in contemporary culture.

In Lost Objects, a series of photographic images, remnants from cremated human bodies such as metal fragments, surgical implants and unburnt materials are transformed into haunting celestial forms. These objects, once held within the body, now appear as planetary-like entities suspended in darkness. Ambiguous, beautiful and unsettling, they evoke distant worlds while pointing to what is left behind when the body is gone. These are the overlooked residues of lives lived, artefacts of the flesh reimagined as cosmic debris.

Time Machine is a moving image installation composed of three stacked televisions, showing footage from within a cremator. The flame dances in real time, mesmerising and violent, a stark and unflinching witness to the moment of transformation. The work reflects on the absence of ritual, the curtain that closes with no further acknowledgement, and the societal impulse to turn away from death. It asks what happens when a life ends, and how little we allow ourselves to truly see.

Together, these works explore death, loss and mourning, and how our responses to them are shaped by the material world. Weeks’s practice questions our emotional and cultural distance from the realities of death while gently confronting the viewer with what remains. These works do not offer closure but instead open up a quiet space for reflection, on the body, on belief and on what it means to let go.

Spiritus and One Reaches Out

Spiritus is a body of work born from a personal exploration into the unknown realms between life and death. Using ghost-hunting equipment and participating in ghost hunts, Weeks sought to encounter and capture traces of the afterlife.

The images are abstract, offering only fleeting glimpses of what might be, teasing the boundaries between presence and absence. Accompanying the visuals is an audio piece titled One Reaches Out, a recording from a spirit box believed to communicate with the other side, adding a spectral layer to the experience.

This work investigates the relationship between direct experience and visual interpretation, guiding viewers through a multi-layered journey into the mysteries of connection between the living and the dead. By employing tools thought to bridge worlds, Weeks creates an immersive and intense encounter that challenges perception and invites contemplation.

Spiritus asks us to question what lies beyond, to interpret what we cannot fully see or hear, and to engage with the haunting possibilities of presence beyond the physical.

Minutes and Chapels of Rest

Who are we? Where are we going? And why?

In our culture, death remains a subject often avoided and rarely discussed, despite being the one certainty that connects us all. As humans, we fear death and resist facing it. Yet, paradoxically, we are also fascinated by it. Freud famously suggested that beneath this fear lies an unconscious desire to die.

This deeply personal project is an exploration of what happens after we die. Through a series of photographs, it traces the journey of the body through cremation and captures the uncanny, liminal spaces of chapels of rest, places where the living and the dead momentarily meet.

Minutes and Chapels of Rest seeks to break the taboo surrounding death and to bring viewers closer to this shared, inevitable experience. Through photography, the work invites the audience into spaces they might ordinarily avoid, encouraging reflection and opening a dialogue about mortality, loss and the rituals that shape our understanding of death.

One Last View

These beautiful locations around the UK hold a hidden history of death. They are among the most common suicide spots in the country, places where people have chosen to end their lives.

Those who have died by suicide are completely absent. The viewer is invited to step into their place to see through their eyes and contemplate the final landscape they witnessed before death.

Move to the edge and share in their last earthly view.