The design of the built environment is often in the hands of a select few. Yet, the land users, with little to no agency in the conception, design and making of the wider cultural landscape, are exposed to it in their daily lives. Questions arise. How does the built environment affect us? How do we experience spaces, how do we turn them into places meaningful to us? How can we react to the built environment and (re)claim space through image-making and mark-making? “Corpus | Delicti” is a project on promenades and seawalls and their materiality in North Wales and Mid Wales. These structures often serve a dual role as sea defences (with increasing importance) and as sites of leisure and psychological recreation; their construction democratises access to the seaside. This analogue project is an experimentation on using the photographic material to record traces additional to light, and an exploration on the materiality of the medium itself and of what is photographed. To mark the images with the textures of the surfaces of promenades and sea walls, I returned to the places I photographed, and scratched the developed negatives on the surfaces shown in the images. The scratches, made as spontaneous gestures, are driven by the subconscious as a creative force, mirroring or contrasting the lines, forms and shapes encountered on location. The marks of the external world - the thing photographed - and an imprint of my inner world while making work, blend into one image. This process can be seen as an intervention not in the environment itself but in its representation. It mediates my connection with the human-made environment, its components and materials, and uncovers emotional energy. The act of scratching the film negatives, inflicting destruction in order to create, shapes my relationship with the artwork: it requires letting go, taking risks, accepting the loss of images, and embracing chance.