MAP6 decided to explore Finland this year, and spent 5 days in the country – each member pursuing their own interests as a contribution to the collective’s overall project. It was challenging for me, but enjoyable – I'm a studio photography, and usually plan and control taking photos meticulously over lengthy periods of time!

▲ Landbo, Finland. Rich Cutler, 2019

Work from my project has been selected for the exhibition Now You Don't: Photography and Extinction by the the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography. More...

Extract from the exhibition statement:

''In living memory, global populations of fishes, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles more than doubled what remains today. In a geological blink-of-the-eye, half of the earth’s species will be threatened with extinction. This loss will crescendo for the rest of the century. Photographic artists across the medium are grappling with the ongoing realities and predictions of mass extinction. Now You Don’t: Photography and Extinction seeks to make the biodiversity crisis increasingly perceptible and looks at photography in an attempt to fathom the severity of this change. The forty-six works collected here gesture toward a contemporary aesthetics of endangerment and species loss.''

▲ Image from my Insecta project.

I'm pleased to report that the MAP6 photography collective invited me to join today.

MAP6 describes itself as "10 photographers working together to learn, experiment and make new work about the complex relationship between people and place. Annually, the group travels to a place new to everyone, and over the course of a week the group works to form a collective, photographic impression of that place through its landscape and people".

Work by MAP6 has been featured by the British Journal of Photography and the BBC, and appeared in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

▲ Right-hand page: photo by MAP6 member Heather Shuker, selected for Portrait of Britain, from MAP6 collective's The Shetland Project.

As part Brighton Photo Fringe 2018 I'm exhibiting a selection of images from my Digital Archaeology Project at Damage in Trafalgar Street. On lightboxes! For more details...

''Today's technological change is unprecedented. We are both in awe of and intimidated by our devices: we want to possess them but fear being possessed by them; we are schizophrenics, both technophiles and technophobes. A paradox: despite recent manufacture, how can 21st-century technology be as ancient as these photographs suggest?''

▲ Lightboxes installed at Damage

My Insecta project – including a new "Cabinet of Curiosities" installation – will be in the contemporary art exhibition Animalia at the Sassoon Gallery, Folkestone this autumn. Other artists include Tessa Farmer, Kelly McCallum, Dorcas Casey, Fleur Alston, Andrew Bruce, Chris F. Clark, Ali Farmer, Paul Koudounaris and Angela Wooi, among others.

About the exhibition

''From the wild to the domestic, a fleeting glimpse to be distantly admired or something on the plate, the relationship of animals with humans is complex, multi-layered and Animalia will generate friction and fusion between death and life, us and them, wild and tame.

''Animalia seeks to create a dynamic space to question our perceptions, perfectly situated in this coastal town at the edge of human interaction with creatures of the cultivated land and untamed sea. We invite you to participate in this vibrant re-imaging of what is animal and what is human, to investigate our interconnectedness as species in the past and present. This exhibition promises to be emotive, explorative and playful, sounding out a new voice for the wordless and rendering unfamiliar images for animals we think we know.''

Private view

8 September 6–8pm

Where and when

Sassoon Gallery, 2 Grace Hill, Folkestone CT20 1HD [Map]

8–28 September 2016

Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri: 9am–6pm. Thu: 9am–8pm. Sat: 9am–5pm. Sun: 10am–4pm