They all say Please

As a vicar’s wife I encounter prayer in many facets of my life. After finding (and reading) a bunch of prayer cards in church I set out on a quest to find more of other people's prayers. I discovered online prayer forums where people post their prayers on the internet to an anonymous audience in the hopes that someone will petition on their behalf. The dominant type of prayer these forums attract are more like wishes - 'wish-prayers'. These are the kinds of prayers that many of us can't help ourselves from uttering irrespective of belief. They can often appear naive, selfish and arbitrary. I edited the prayers down and created photographic interpretations for them. My images are not intended to be illustrations of the words but rather I hope multiple narratives and subtexts will emerge in the readings. An open engagement with both text and image is what this work hopes to unlock for the viewer. As I continued to work with these prayers; dissecting and rupturing them, my scepticism grew into compassion. I soon realised that, at some point in my life, many of these prayers had subconsciously been my own.