Sarah Skinner

I began using a mirrorless camera around 6 years ago and have always enjoyed the random, the weird and the accidents of photographic image-making. I’m finding the Surrealist concept of  ‘objective chance’ more interesting than my attempts at technical perfection.
 

I'm based in Belper, close to the Derbyshire Dales, the White Peak and the Gritstone edges so walking and photographing feels to me like an inevitable combination. 

 The  Open College of the Arts course ‘Investigating Place with Psychogeography’, which I completed at the end of 2025, has been really inspirational. I am looking at the places I know well and the new places I encounter through a different ‘lens’. 

Psychogeography, it seems to me, can be developed as an intuitive way to inspire creative outputs using the Situationist-inspired methods of the dérive. 

I've taken note particularly of the way that contemporary feminist writers such as Sonia Overall and Lauren Elkin have expanded the male-dominated/privileging methodology with their own experiences and philosophies. Like them I embrace the rural as well as the urban, my walks too can be made random. I've experienced how making repeated visits, ‘secular pilgrimages’ combined with research and generally deep-diving can be really fruitful, inspiring and motivating.

I'd love to exhibit my photographs and I'm currently exploring small photobooks, physical and digital, as a way of telling stories and creating layers of meaning. 

Art History will always inform my work, it was my degree subject and in the past I worked as a curator in public art galleries in Manchester, Nottingham and Glasgow.

I've lived in Derbyshire for over 20 years and walk in the Peaks and Dales almost every weekend. I am really interested in landscape as a place for leisure and pleasure but can't help but see the human-created mess and detritus with which the countryside is littered, whether that is historic mining, contemporary quarrying or over-enthiusiastic barrier-making. 

Ash-dieback is having a huge impact on the limestone gorges of the White Peak, it is making me wonder if it is just a symptom of a much greater change coming …