The ritual always begins with silence.
The ritual always begins with silence.
The ritual always begins with silence.
Before the pixels. Before the page. Before the flicker of a cursor.
Lately, I’ve been deep in the sigil process—those small, charged glyphs I weave not only into notebooks or paper scraps but into metadata, filenames, alt text. Symbols masked in plain sight. In an age where screens eclipse the sun and data bleeds into every waking moment, magic has to evolve. The spell is not only spoken or scratched—it is encoded.
Each sigil is a condensation of intent. Made slowly, with intention, often sparked by dreams or the stray repetition of a word whispered by the wind while walking at dusk.
I’ve started hiding them in my photographs—barely-there carvings etched into walls, clouds, negative space. Most won’t notice. But those who need to will feel it. That tingle. That pull.
This week, I uncovered three forgotten relics. Not objects—images. Buried deep within a corrupted hard drive, misnamed folders, and digital ruins I had abandoned years ago. Grain-heavy landscapes warped by time, street scenes blurred by breath and motion. Forgotten spells waiting to be spoken again.
I restored them with care. Not cleaned. Not perfected.
Just... respected.
These were once discarded offerings. Now, they feel like warnings.
Navigating the digital world as a dark sorcerer is not about control—it’s about distortion. Disruption. The internet is flooded with clarity, filters, gloss. But I prefer noise. Glitch. The moments where the code forgets itself and the machine reveals something raw, something real.
I work in layers. Obfuscate meaning. Bury it like bones.
Let the viewer dig.
So if you’re reading this and feeling the weight of your own forgotten files, your unfinished edits, your "failed" images—pause. Look again. There’s something sacred in the remains. Something powerful in the fracture. Not every photo is a masterpiece. Some are relics. Some are rituals.
You just haven’t carved the sigil yet.
— Negative Ritual
📁 process_log_0425.sigilx archived
The negative ritual
Negative Ritual explores themes of memory, absence, and transformation through a quiet, process-led approach to photography. Rooted in the ritual of making—whether developing film by hand or walking familiar streets—the work draws on the symbolic weight of the photographic negative: a space where presence and absence coexist. Using black and white street studies, landscape and nature observations, and portrait commissions, the project circles ideas of loss, reflection, and the traces we leave behind. There’s a subtle, almost occult undercurrent—less about spectacle, more about what fades, lingers, or slips just out of view.
Negative Ritual is a body of work rooted in landscape, memory, and the quiet pull of the in-between. It blends black and white street photography with nature studies, fine art processes, and self-developed techniques—each image unfolding like a fragment or trace. Themes of absence, time, and stillness run through the work, often circling back to familiar places seen through a changed lens.
Portraits and commissions are approached with the same quiet intensity, favouring atmosphere over spectacle. There’s an undercurrent of ritual in the way the images are made and chosen—less about the moment and more about the echo it leaves behind.
Some say the work carries a charge, that viewing it too long invites visions or stirs something buried. Portraits are rare and often unsettling, as if they reveal more than the subject offered. Each image is a fragment of a larger pattern, though no full picture has ever been confirmed. Whether artist, archivist, or quiet conjurer of the in-between, Negative Ritual leaves behind no answers—only traces.