inspiration

Every piece begins somewhere wild.

The Pennines are not a gentle landscape. They resist prettiness, all peat bog and exposed moorland, sky that changes faster than you can photograph it, light that arrives sideways and leaves without warning.

"I am drawn to the wild elements that sting my face as I create outdoors, the wind, the weather, the untamed. That wildness and freedom feed a deep need in me to make art that stirs something real, that pulls people back into connection with the natural world."

This is where my practice is rooted. Not in the studio, but out there, in the places that feel older than us, that exist entirely on their own terms. Every body of work I make is an attempt to hold something of that feeling still, long enough for someone else to feel it too.

A MEDITATION ON Wildness + Witness

One of the most beautiful sights in the world to me is a horse running without restraint. That power, that unrestrained movement, it is what drew me to photography and what continues to fuel everything I make.

But it is not only the horse. It is the landscape that holds them. The peat bog, the windswept moorland, the sacred stillness of remote islands. Places that exist entirely on their own terms. I am drawn to both to bear witness before they disappear.

In Eastern spiritual traditions, the Windhorse carries powerful positive energy, moving through the world simply by existing. I like to think each piece I create holds a little of that spirit, something of the wind, the moor, the horse. An invitation to pause, and remember the wild that still lives within us all.

“When I am out in the wild photographing horses, or making cyanotypes on the moor, or deep in an encaustic piece in the studio, I love the feeling of stillness that descends. As if the world has stopped, and I am allowed to breathe for the first time in a while.”
— Esther Towler

Process

Previously working as a police photographer, where precision and objectivity were everything, and then for many years creating horse and owner portraits, my practice has undergone a profound transformation. I have moved from making images for others toward making work that comes entirely from my own compulsion. From documentation toward feeling.

Today I work across three mediums: lens-based photography, environmental cyanotype, and photo-encaustic, each one allowing me to express a different facet of wildness. Sometimes only a photograph will do. Sometimes the work needs the weight and texture of wax. Sometimes it needs the alchemy of light and water and gathered moorland plants. I follow what the subject demands.

Step by step

  • Field

    Every piece begins with being present. I work slowly and quietly in the landscape, waiting for the moment a horse moves without awareness of being watched, or light falls across moorland in a way that won't last. Patience is the first part of the process.

  • Moor

    Paper sensitised with iron salts is carried out onto Saddleworth Moor and exposed under open sky. Plants gathered on location, moorland grasses, heather, and ferns, are pressed directly onto the surface. The moor itself becomes the studio.

  • Chemistry

    Each print is washed in peat bog water drawn from the moor, the ancient chemistry of the landscape interacting with the light-sensitive emulsion. The image emerges slowly, Prussian blue rising from amber as the water does its work. No two prints reveal themselves in quite the same way.

  • encaustic prints

    Studio

    Back in the studio, molten beeswax, pigment, and resin are built up in layers over a photographic base, each fused with heat and allowed to cool before the next is added. It is slow, meditative work, impossible to rush.

  • photo-encaustic artwork

    Surface

    The encaustic surface shifts as light moves across it, catching here, softening there. Translucent and luminous, it holds depth the way water does. Each piece takes weeks to complete and a full six months to fully cure.