Siblings, in its Anglo-Saxon root, sibb, doesn’t refer exclusively to immediate brothers and sisters, but to a whole network of connections, affinities, the self extended, the body unbordered, unguarded, evident in acts of shoulders dropping, and all that is clenched, finally unclenched, when siblings meet. For me, that unclenching has been a mystery. 

 

I’m slowly learning about the ways autism shapes my approach to the world, that for those of us on the spectrum, developmental paths aren’t pre-written in the same ways as they are for those who aren’t. That we are kind of just tossed to do the task of living, and that task of living isn’t like walking, but rather always trying to gather our balance after tripping. The task is to invent our own way of living, appropriating in our own ways, whatever elements we find.

 

It's often in unkempt green spaces that I finally enter that ease one finds around siblings, settling into that ventral vagal state that forms all connections. I find the widely shared fear of nature hard to recognise. I have, instead, spent a life navigating that fear towards people. In these photographs, I’ve tried to capture being siblings to the grass, the root, the dirt itself. I sought to photograph what is true: flora is the only sister I have ever known. In her company, I arrive unguarded, undone, my most myself.

​