Biddy Hodgkinson is a very talented artist.
I was commissioned by her to make her work visible to a wider audience on the web.
Not only did I photograph all her paintings to produce an online catalogue of her work but also shot a series of portraits of her in her environment.
Biddy was a charming host and we spent almost as much time chatting as taking photos.
It’s important to build a rapport with people you’re photographing and quickly get an understanding of what they’re about, but we probably overdid it.
She was brought up in the 1960s on a farm in England where Biddy was constantly observing life and death cycles and this is reflected in her work which draws upon the landscape around her.
Walking into her studio I immediately came upon a mummified squirrel corpse that Biddy had been “watching” for weeks as it decomposed.
I didn’t turn my back on her again.
Inspiration for her work comes from close observations of these life and death cycles and a fascination for the beauty and luminosity in decay – this is reflected in the colours and tones of her work.
