This project began as a technical idea: I wanted to explore stroboscopic flash photography and initially considered working with a local ballet school to capture dancers in motion. However, as the planning progressed, I realised the concept wasn’t truly collaborative, I already had a defined vision and was essentially looking for people to help execute it, rather than co-developing the idea. There were also logistical and safeguarding concerns around working with under-18 dancers, which made it difficult to pursue responsibly alongside my other work.​

A turning point came through a conversation with Jessica Harington, a Fine Art student. We found immediate creative synergy in our interest in experimental photographic techniques such as strobe layering, shutter drag, and visual abstraction, as well as in using movement to explore emotion, vulnerability, and identity. After our initial meeting, Jess created a poster to invite collaborators (on left), which we shared around the university.​

That outreach was crucial. It brought new voices into the project, including Rose, a photography student and trained ballerina, and Chloe Mars, a previous collaborator of mine who also works with expressive movement. From that moment, the project became something more meaningful: a true collaboration shaped by shared concepts, open dialogue, and collective experimentation.​

As the project evolved, the idea of darkness and light, and how the body moves through both, emerged as a central theme. That’s how the name Lygophobia came about: a metaphor for both the technical process (working with darkness, bursts of light, slow exposure) and the emotional undertone (confronting fear, vulnerability, and the unseen self).​

This collaboration became an exploration of how light, time, and gesture can be used to express what isn’t always visible, and how shared authorship can push a concept far beyond what any one of us might have created alone.​