Artist Statement:

I have just completed a BA in Media Production at Lincoln University where I specialised in Still Image and New Media for my final two years. The work shown here is a small collection of the images I took for my final project. I decided to do this on the historic English dance, Morris Dancing.
Dance is one of the most accessible and universal mediums of communication, which is the reason why it is used by traditional cultures as a visual form of storytelling. Meaning is conveyed through movement of the body, facial expressions, gestures of the hands, elaborate costumes or masks, and via the accompanied music. For this reason, to create a full documentary of the Morris I wanted to convey a sense of all of these qualities of the dance. I also wanted to show an in-depth documentary that will catch the atmosphere that the dancers try to express, besides breaking the stereotypical image that surrounds Morris Dancers. For this reason I incorporated some series’ of events, such as the May Day Dawn ritual which is celebrated across the country, and portraits to take the project past the idea of being based solely upon Morris Dancing but to the characters that make it possible. Hopefully by doing so I conveyed that there is a very large variant upon age, sex, costume, dance etc. and try and show a small illustration of a mainly unknown subject which makes up a part of our British heritage.