 My mother said it was too hard a life and wouldn't let me learn it. At 36 I started with the creel. It seemed like the natural thing to do. At first I felt as if my neck was breaking. It's an art you know. I used to practice with the two stone box of clippers and then I got used to it. My project is working with a calotype salt fruit that was made by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. It depicts a fish wife from New Haven in Edinburgh. This is one of the world's earliest examples of photographic portraiture. You can see that Hill named many of the sitters. Here we have Jeannie Wilson and Annie Linton. This is in his hand. Naming of these sitters has made this line of research relatively straightforward. In the 1841 census held at the National Records of Scotland it becomes quite easy to keep these particular people and get a sense of their lives, their occupations, where they lived in New Haven when they married. And in the case of Elizabeth Johnson Hall I managed to piece together and create a broader portrait of her life. She actually died in 1901 and sadly did so in relative poverty. Her house still stands today, that too west or close in New Haven. By the time we have this 1931 German volume the fish wives are no longer named and Johnson Hall is Fish Wife 26. She's become known to us through time as a New Haven beauty and even a New Haven Madonna. Hill's New Haven fish wife, her eyes cast down in such indolent seductive modesty as something that cannot be silenced. Something that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there. Like Bedouin I share an urge to get closer to the fish wife. So I turned to my photographic practice and in the learning and the remaking of the calotype. New narratives started to present themselves. For instance, in the case of the subjects that I photographed freckles would appear or the accentuated tattoos would disappear and folds of cloth would all reveal themselves in new and immediate ways. And I was really starting to rethink the terms in which these portraits were made and it was significant that the sitters didn't really recognise their photographs self. So through my practice I was starting to understand the calotype negative on new terms. So I returned to the archive this time at Glasgow University Library and that was in search of an outtake and remarkably came across exactly what I was looking for. And what we have is the calotype paper negative outtake of Elizabeth Johnson-Holm and what becomes really significant is that she returns the gaze and in doing so disrupts this century of analysis of her seductive sheen where her agency is brought into view in the slight smile that she has for the camera and her looking directly into the camera lens.