British landscape photographer, Ellie Davies, has produced a beautiful new body of work, ‘Fires’. In this new series, Ellie continues her long preoccupation with the woodland, this time combining it with the elemental quality of fire with all its deeply symbolic narratives, bringing together the opposing themes of life and death, creation and destruction, love and loss and the human versus the natural world.
The small fires present in these images cast the forest in a warm light, holding back the dark, bringing a sense of safety and comfort not only transforming the forest but temporarily altering it. A man-made fire however must be built and lit, tended and fed. Its mere presence implies the existence of people, and the human narrative remains despite their absence. The viewer is left to weave their own experience into the woodland, invited to enter, to sit down, to be silent and still; to become a part of the wood and for a time to find a place within it.
Ellie has had a busy 2018 with solo exhibitions in Milan, Brussels and New Delhi as well as unveiling her new work at Photo London. This year her work was also selected for the publication American Photography 33, a curated collection of some of the best in contemporary photography and in The British Journal of Photography’s Guide to Collecting produced in conjunction with Photo London. To see more of Ellie’s work, click here
