Finnian Croy (he/him)

On an Inner Hebridean Island, slick slithers of oil black earth scarring the moors catch the sunlight off the roadside that’s heading up onto the hill. It’s here in peat banks capped by coarse heather and sphagnum moss from which peat is formed that my photographic and sculptural practice has evolved and developed throughout the past year.

On a closer inspection of these peat banks I’ve realised that they’re more than sodden soil: for me they hold within them layers of ancestral community and home, visual and visceral connections to questions surrounding identity and sex, and a rhythmic pulsation of time, tradition and temporality within the ecological mesh.

I use self-portraiture as a means of escape, a subversion of expectation and a form of creative joy. The project Sìdhean – the Gaelic word for fairies – also includes images that are free of the physical body and uses landscape to enhance a personal mythology, ritual and storytelling within the work.