Midnight Blooms
This ongoing series began not in the studio, but outdoors at midday, chasing the hardest, brightest light rather than avoiding it. Where most photographic practice treats harsh midday sun as something to work around, I found myself drawn to exactly that: the sharp shadow patterns it throws across leaves and petals, the way it reveals structure that softer light hides.
That fascination became technical experimentation, and experimentation became process, a body of work built entirely from cyanotype exposures made in direct sunlight. At the centre of each composition sits a single bloom at the peak of its display, caught in the same light that brought it there.
Midnight Blooms
Created as part of the Allegory on Anthropocene project, The Anchor for this project Allegory, which examines the symbolic fables related to flowers. Red Parable draws on the fictional flower “Pyraea”. A rare bloom said to be woven from starlight an sustained by fire. The flowing gladioli from is transformed through cyanotype and layered pigment, creating an image that exists between botanical record and imagined narrative. The work considers how cultures have turned to myth to understand powerful natural forces. These works combines botanical cyanotype processes with composite macro photography, then over painted. Its concept is exploring the increasingly blurred relationship between nature and human influence where the flower becomes both specimen and storyteller, carrying traces of fragility and transformation. Through layers of colour and photographic imprint, the work reflects on how natural forms persist, adapt and evolve within landscapes shaped by human activity.
"The process is both analytical and intuitive. I am interested in the tension between detail and abstraction, the moment when a recognisable form begins to shift into something more ambiguous and emotionally charged."
Clare Newton
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Clare Newton
Interdisciplinary Photographic Artist
© 2026 Clare Newton Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
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