I’ve been working recently with Laura Pannack, my favourite photographer with whom I’ve been lucky enough to develop something of a friendship and, more recently, a mentoring relationship. I pay her of course – love needs to be fed – but it’s been among the singularly most rewarding and productive engagements I’ve ever had.

Laura has been helping me develop direction when it comes to broader themes in projects, identifying how to create a photographic vision based on the themes I want to explore and then how to translate that to a single image. We’ve been using that dialogue to give direction and focus to my work with Ivan on what I guess will by default come to called ‘The Divided Self’.

At the moment the project is still very much focused on Ivan and his experience of psychosis rather than psychosis in general. As much as I would like to be able to take a more open direction to a project theme, in the same way that (ostensibly) portrait photographers such as Laura do, or indeed Alec Soth, Kovi Konowiecki and, in particular, Bryan Schutmaat, whose work I adore almost as much as Laura’s, I find myself still inexorably drawn to the person and the corporeal.

Nevertheless, these images represent an effort to break a little with the corporeal and find a way of representing it within the context of the environment. I often try to think of how literature might inform my work and see whether there might be parallels between the authors I’ve enjoyed in my life and the themes they themselves address. Steinbeck and Hardy immediately spring to mind as authors who ostensibly write about their characters’ relationship to, and connection with, the land.

With Ivan, the principal theme is his connection with the land and how that provides him with a source of succour and comfort. It always strikes me that he is most alive and engaged when he is outdoors, so the idea is to develop a series of images of him in a more varied landscapes, connected with the land.