AHH Studio Collective

Lucy Saggers

I photograph stories of rural life, looking at themes of community and belonging through threads connecting people, landscape, past, present and future. I’m interested in the impressions we leave on each other, the land and the marks a place leaves on us. Informed by my background in nature conservation I work collaboratively to build understanding and dialogue. Using a handheld camera and available light, I prefer to remain unobtrusive. From my AHH Collective studio in Malton I make limited edition prints on heavyweight, fine art paper often working in black and white to abstract emotion and blur the line between past and present.

My book, Ford of the Sorrel (Bluecoat Press, 2021), documents 10 years of interwoven lives of residents in my home village: ‘these photographs are poems and short stories; they are miniatures and epics; they are tiny movements at the edge of the folding map and huge gestures at the vortex of the turning world’ (Ian McMillan). With an Arts Council grant in 2023 I began new work: At the Still Point of the Turning World, incorporating landscapes, portraits, archive material and oral history focusing on some of the longest-term residents of Ampleforth, my home for 20 years.

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