Uncle Joe’s Mintballs, a nostalgia trip in a tin right there.

My Grandad always had a bag of these ‘travel sweets’ in his old #Volvo240. With the hand knitted crochet blanket and the Reader’s Digest volume on the backshelf for in-car entertainment.  What else?!  Why a box set of country & western audio cassettes bought from a Sunday supplement of course.

And those Uncle Joe’s, they tasted just grand on the journey home, with both of us soaked to the Cumbrian skin with wind-whipped & rain-blasted cheeks after a challenging Lakeland summit hike together.  Nothing like a fellside facial to freshen the pores.  We scaled Blencathra, Striding Edge, Fleetwith Pike and so slatey, many more fells.

With mint balls setting the (prop)scene for this textiles shoot along with hot July sunshine rather than Lakeland drizzle beaming down to light the photography, it was another riot of colour and pattern.

My work, my job, this taking of photographs malarkey does make my heart sing quite a cotton pickin’ by the yard, watch-out-for-the-pins whole lot.

I get to play with textiles like these delicious new prints and shades by Queen Couleur Kate Titley of @titleyandmarr.  There’s Zig Zag, Tick Tack and Trellis in a variety of colourways.

But! Big, fat, box-pleated BUT! .. I definitely also hear a twangy, squeaky violin sound between the ears when I’ve to hand back neatly folded metres of the gorgeous stuff.  Actually, what I’d rather be doing, is planning room schemes & matchy-matchy paint + soft furnishing combos.

I am always inspired by the palette within T&M Collections – Kate designs beautiful textiles – and relish the opportunity to shoot each new selection of T&M rolls.

A nemophilist is someone who loves woodland and forest.  Phil Walker is absolutely the definition of one, with a background in tree surgery and wood sculpture and working now in the South Downs National Park. 

I can completely see the lure of working both with your hands and around wood in all its beautiful and distinctly different and colourful varieties day in, day out.

We captured some of his process in Phil’s rural workshop space recently.  There was some Saturday scorching in progress on the day I delivered prints.  

We also visited some of his commissions in situ to photograph these as they display and weather outside in the elements.

It felt right to treat some of the photography in black & white. Whilst certain pieces remain rich in their timber tones, others, once manually scorched, become very densely blackened and charred.

With work showing in a forthcoming exhibition, Phil now has plentiful imagery, both colour and black & white photography, to populate his new website and represent his current body of work.