Picton Ferry: Sleepers and Dreamers
All images copyright Keiko Ikeuchi and Marie-Gabrielle Rotie; all rights reserved.
Photography Process
Pi
I have been photographing and documenting this location in Pembrokeshire West Wales for the last ten years, and have visited for the last fifty years. In that time, relatives who walked this area with me have died, and the area is a place of both wonderment, loss and ghosts. I sometimes imagine Graham Sutherland walking ahead of me, leading my eye to see the world and place as he might have seen it. His paintings are full of motifs that come directly from this specific estuary location.
In 2024 and 2025 I finally got the opportunity to gather a creative team to then embody the ideas and research that form this project. The performers in the images are friends who I have know for many years and who all live in the UK but originally come from various locations around the world: including Poland, Venezuela, Kazakhstan. I wanted to work with people from all ages and backgrounds and not necessarily professional dancers, although these performers are all artists, creatives and makers in their own right.
We visited the location together over several days in June 2024 and I chose specific locations which I had documented previously, along the stretch of the Picton Ferry estuary. I spent time watching the performers moving in each location and then choreographed the bodies into my camera frame, and took sample test shots. I already had many ideas of how I wanted bodies to appear and had formulated the idea of the body as a sleeper or dreamer in the landscape.
These test images were then shared with the photographer Keiko Ikeuchi who eventually joined us on location and then followed my artistic direction, but also gave her own collaborative experience and expertise for these photographs and particularly in the post-production
Peformers in Picton Ferry: Sleeping and Dreaming
Roberto Sbraccio
Angelina Kornecka
Yuliya Krylova
Marie-Gabrielle Rotie
Costume: Yuliya Krylova