My practice stems from walking at night. In the darkness, rocks become more than vantage points, they become the landscape itself because we cannot see beyond them due to torchlight reach. This limited visibility shifted how I perceive and frame the natural world in my work. I use long-exposure photography, artificial lighting and digital manipulation to create high-contrast compositions, invite viewers to reconsider how they experience and interpret nature.

Initially, my work focused on creating compositions that transform natural rock formations into sculptural presences. I connected this work to land art, British surrealism, and the traditions of walking art, drawing inspiration from artists such as Eileen Agar and Paul Nash; however, the photographs have developed to be more about revelation than documentation. The editing process is about interpretation, offering not a literal record but a visual echo of emotional experience, a way to express the memory of an encounter with the landscape. I am interested in how photography can convey emotional truths through constructed imagery.

Conceptually and visually, my images aim to evoke the sublime. I intentionally draw on the romantic tradition of nature as overwhelming and emotionally charged. Using contemporary tools, I aim to recreate and update that tradition: to provoke awe, to evoke a sense of self and contemplation. The sublime, to me, is a way to access deeper emotional and psychological relationships with the landscape.

I want the heather to grow over me, for I will not have moved. I am at rest here. I want my eulogy to be one of the mountains and moors. Please picture me in the heather. Picture me as the heather, for I am the mountain. I belong here.

– Beth Rippin, Derwent Edge, 2025.

The work resonates with the landscape rather than altering it. I see the landscape as a medium and subject influenced by artists like Letha Wilson, who combine photography with sculptural elements to explore the relationship between nature and human activity.

The physical process behind each image is mostly hidden: climbing, carrying equipment, installing lights and waiting for the stars. These actions blur the line between photography and land art, especially when the lights are installed. My use of lighting is also symbolic, shaping the viewer's emotional and spatial relationship to the rock. To illuminate the rock, acknowledge it, and momentarily centre it in human experience. The resulting images contain subtle traces of these actions, from lighting to chalk marks, which create a quiet dialogue between permanence and impermanence within my work.

While my work is grounded in Fine Art, the images also function editorially and digitally, particularly in outdoor and environmental publications, where they provide an interpretive, emotional counterpoint to traditional landscape photography. Large-format prints create immersive experiences that demand slow looking, amplifying the rocks' monumental nature and mirroring grandeur, which is traditionally associated with the sublime.

I am still exploring the boundaries of the sublime in photography, trying to sustain emotional resonance through subtle staged interventions without crossing into spectacle. Ultimately, my work invites reflection on how we move through, witness and emotionally engage with landscapes. My work is not a record of nature but a constructed, intimate encounter with it.