Heartside
Heartside
Heartside was a name before it became a photography project.
It began as the name of my home in Victoria, Australia. I wanted something that felt like more than just an address — something with heart and soul, and that sense of connection and belonging that makes somewhere feel like home.
So I called it Heartside.
With Boots and Reksio by my side, it has become much more than a house. It has been the place where our life has unfolded — muddy paws and familiar paths through the garden, things growing and changing as months pass by, people coming and going, and all the ordinary routines that don't seem particularly important while you're living them.
Looking back, I think those ordinary things have always been what mattered most.
Over time, Heartside has come to mean more to me than the place itself.
It is still home, but I have come to recognise something in the way I feel there — a connection to the people, animals and things around me, a curiosity about the garden as it changes, an appreciation for familiar routines, and a growing awareness of how much of life happens in moments we barely notice at the time.
Somehow, I recongnised that that feeling has always been there with me throughout my life.
I have found it in the people I've met, the animals I've loved, the places I've visited and the things that have made me stop and look. Sometimes it has been somewhere completely unfamiliar; other times, something I've seen every day for years.
I have come to realise that Heartside isn't really about where I am. It is about how I experience where I am.
Photography has always been part of my life, so perhaps it was inevitable that the two would eventually find each other.
There wasn't a moment when I decided that my photography would become Heartside.
Somehow, it just did.
The photographs have come to hold many of the same things the name has come to mean to me — curiosity, connection, appreciation and being present to whatever is happening in front of me.
And Heartside has become less about a particular place and more about a way of living. Paying attention. Finding something worth noticing in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. Appreciating the people, animals and places that become part of our lives, and recognising that everything is changing, even when it feels as though nothing is happening at all.
Heartside remains the name of my home, but to me it has become so much more than just a name.
It has become a way of living, an expression of self, and something I carry with me wherever I go. A reminder to stay curious, to look a little closer and to appreciate what is here while it is here.
Somewhere along the way, that way of experiencing the world has found its way into my photographs too.
And that is what Heartside has become.
Life. Unfolding.
