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Emerging image series of camps I have found in the woodlands [and parks] of the UK.

The building of these wild camps is another phenomena that, for all the techno domesticity of our world today, seems to speak of an enduring wildness in us and its sustained call.

I like to observe the simple hand worked creativity of their build, the choices made on how to shape the structure, the branches chosen, the imagining of how to bed down, but also of the places chosen, the clearings and hidden spaces. Where does this impulse to build them come from? What is it about?

I think many of them are made by kids, which I find also fascinating - does it perhaps reveal some kind of instinctive urge or deep subconscious memory of the necessity to make shelter, to know ourselves alive in the wild, living within ‘nature’, as a part of our landscape?

I find it good to recognise these instinctive urges and acts that somehow prevail, seemingly without particular necessity in a techno domesticated world, but nonetheless revealing of something of our deeper nature.