Rachel Wright - examples of work.

Work-in-progress explorations of ecology and the materiality of place.

I’m sure the blackberries come earlier every year…

Botanically toned cyanotypes
2025 - ongoing

Botanically toned cyanotypes exploring the way the human-made climate crisis is reshaping our environment through disrupting phenology (the timing of seasonal activity in ecosystems).

While more subtle than dramatic effects of climate change such as fires and floods, this shifting of seasonal markers may still have a serious impact - if interacting species (such as predator and prey or plant and pollinator) shift their life cycle timings in a way that becomes unsynchronised, this mismatch may lead to, for example, flowers not being pollinated or lack of food for a particular bird or caterpillar, and these effects will ripple out into the wider ecosystem.

This of course has potential consequences for humans in terms of practical issues like food production. It also has a more undefinably unsettling quality as our markers of time shapeshift and blur. Even if we’re not entirely sure why, there is something disquieting about blossom in November, about ripe blackberries in June, and about ‘unseasonably warm’ days in the depths of winter.

Through layering images from different seasons in my local environment, and creating botanically-toned cyanotypes using mis-matching seasonal plants, this series blurs the boundaries of those markers of time that we perhaps take for granted. Through this ongoing series I hope to bring this little-regarded aspect of climate change to the forefront of people’s minds and open up a conversation about the importance of seasons and our place within them.

ABOVE: Recent work from this series. Multiple exposures of photographs taken in winter and spring, made into cyanotypes in the summer sun, bleached with wood ash from a summer campfire, toned in winter using autumnal oak gall.