I moved to the Oxfordshire countryside from Edinburgh in 2014. I was working more and more in London and seeing less and less of my family. So we stuck a pin in the map and ended up south of Oxford. We thought the countryside might be better for the kids, and so far I think we were not wrong in that respect. However, for us, my wife and I, the countryside felt overbearing. Instead of a sense of release, we felt almost the opposite, a confinement. We tried immediately to sell the house and move back to the town, but we couldn’t sell, so eventually we decided to try and stick it out. The decision came at a time in my life, when like many, no matter what route I chose, I would inevitably hit a brick wall. A crushing stop. The classic mid-life crisis. A period of almost self-destructive self-assessment. It felt sometimes as if I was standing on a cliff edge with everything I owned and had achieved teetering on the edge in front of me, almost taunting me to push it into the sea below and turn my back. What should I do? Give it a shove and walk, or try and pull it all back to safety. I decided to pick up a camera again, the first time in 20 years. Before starting my representation business, I had been a fashion photographer in London. But, this time the camera was all about what I wanted to explore and what I wanted to express, rather than what I was commissioned to capture. A kind of therapy. These Walls is a smaller section of an ongoing project, looking at the wider rural landscapes around me. I have spent the last few years developing my work and discovering what it was I wanted to say. Gradually a narrative began to play out, almost naturally. I started paying more and more attention to the landscapes which lay immediately beside me. The landscape I could reach out and touch. Wider vistas and long reaching views felt less personal to me. The immediate surroundings felt a better reflection of where I was in life. Obviously then came Covid and lockdown, so the whole sense of being trapped became even more prominent and somehow my work felt even more pertinent to me personally because of it. While the project is about reflection and trying to find the positive in what I have, I also want it to portray the sense of frustration I have felt, initially at my own personal disquiet, but then at the subsequent and overwhelming helplessness we have all endured in the past year when confronted by the seismic force of nature itself. Hopefully these images give a degree of hope too – that, albeit the compositions prevent us from seeing the rolling countryside beyond, what we see instead has a beauty, often understated and overlooked, but when given more than a fleeting glance become clearer and more perceptible. - All images were photographed using the Sony A7ii with a 55mm 1.8 lens, all in 2020 apart from image 51.529678,-1.006705, which was shot in November 19. The images are titled with their GPS co-ordinates and all use natural daylight.