THE GREEN FIELDS OF FRANCE

The Green Fields of France is an Irish war ballad set in northern France, where green fields hold the graves of young men lost to war. Framed as a conversation across generations, it questions sacrifice and patriotism, contrasting official narratives with personal loss, memory, and the quiet persistence of sorrow in a foreign landscape.

I have visited France many times, but inspired by the ballad, I visited some official war graves and D Day landing sites. From this I produced this series of collages, all made using layered images that I have taken myself. I called the series The Green Fields of France.

I received honorable mentions for this series in the 2025 ND awards, the Tokyo Photo Awards 2025 and the final image of the series, Mute in the Sand, received a commendation in the UKKPA awards 2025/26.

The second work is called The Green Fields. The land itself becomes the witness. The same donkeys, blossoms, and geese are as alive today as they were on the day of the landings. Barbed wire, poppies, and white crosses speak of lives absorbed by the land, memory intertwined with renewal. I visited places that are now so tranquil and seemingly unimportant that it is impossible to imagine that they were the locations of fierce battles. These places felt more powerful than the regimented cemeteries that somehow seem to sanitize what went on all those years ago.

This work is called Did They Really Believe ? A synopsis of troops landing on Omaha beach that suggests how history reaches us: not as a whole, but in shards and echoes. Flowers radiate across fractured structures, vivid yet broken, showing how memory is refracted through relics and retellings. I felt bombarded by the stories. Horrors engulfed in simplicity: flowers, seaweed, sky

The final piece is called Mute in the Sand a quote from the ballad. It is about a morning when I got up before dawn and walked the length of Omaha beach on my own. This is one of the beaches where American troops landed on D Day. Airless. Silent. Totally different to the day of the landings, which was wild and rough. Stripped of layers, this work is pared back and almost silent: soldiers, a tank, and rows of crosses hover like ghosts against luminous sand and sea. Here, history’s presence was most palpable — not in relics or museums, but in the raw power of place itself. There are ghosts.