Up to Your Knees in Gutters explores my relationship with my father through our shared work as oil boiler technicians in rural Northern Ireland. Having grown up around the job, it is only working alongside him in recent years that I have begun to understand the physical and emotional weight that it carries.

The project looks at how the labour shapes our connection and how it was built not just through conversation but through routine, shared effort and the quiet gestures of the work itself. Moving through domestic spaces and the surrounding landscapes, the images reflect a working-class environment where tools, material and bodies are closely intertwined.

At its core, the work sits within a tension between inheritance and independence. It considers the path that my father has walked and the one, that someday, I may choose to follow, questioning what it means to carry forward a way of life while also trying to define my own.

Photographed on black and white film, the project holds a feeling of nostalgia that is tied not only to the past, but to the future where memory, labour and identity continue to overlap.