Sticky with the residue of sweat, touch and the bruises of passing time, ‘Clutching at Ornaments’ unites the work of photographers Finnegan Travers, Celia Croft and Jesse Glazzard, each artist offering up their own private chapters: from hotel rooms to wrestling rings and beach trips. Like a diary frantically etched in the dark, they hold on to the important snippets – friends asleep, lovers waking, bodies colliding and recovering – so that nothing entirely disappears.

We caught up with the artists to discuss where it all began.

Celia Croft

1. Where did your interest in wrestling/wrestlers start?

I never watched it growing up or anything, but I always loved the wrestling posters I’d see flaking off walls. I shot something with wrestlers for Dazed last year, and after that, I started going to loads of wrestling matches.

2. Could you share a memorable behind-the-scenes moment from capturing one of the photographs in this exhibition?

There’s a photo of a dog in the mountains in Romania taken last summer. Me and my boyfriend at the time had been driving from Lithuania. On this particular morning we were camping in the mountains and were woken by this mountain sheep dog trying to get to the food that was in our tent, and we were afraid it was something bigger.

3. What challenges did you face in selecting which photographs to include in this show, especially considering much of it hasn’t been seen before?

I think the challenge was wanting to include photographs of my own personal life next to photographs that I am an outsider in, such as the wrestling ones. And also mixing very pure documentary shots with things that are a bit more organised and set up. Thinking about how all that relates to one another, I guess the relative link is me, and what I’m curious about, and I’d hope that visually it reads like a story.

4. Do you have a favourite work in the show, and why?

I don’t have a favourite, I always like photographs in groups rather than as individual shots.

5. You mention photographing friends in hotel rooms – temporary spaces. What’s the emotional weight of photographing intimacy in a place no one truly lives?

I love hotel rooms, especially cheap ones in massive hotels that have hundreds of them. There’s a photograph of my friend Milly, in my favourite hotel, The Grand Burstin in Folkestone. We spent hours in that room taking photos of one another. We bought net curtains from a charity shop and replaced the ones in the room for the time we were staying there. You can decide together what that space is going to be, and it can reflect exactly how you feel together in that room at that time.

6. Were your friends aware of the emotional or conceptual framing of the project as you were photographing them? Did that change how they interacted with you?

Not really, this project wasn’t one that I was working on specifically for anything, I was just shooting intuitively. It’s only in the selection process that I realise what I’ve been trying to say.

7. Every image in the show is handprinted. Why is that tactility important to you, especially in work dealing with physicality and touch?

I love objects and collecting tangible things. So I think it’s just an extension of that, creating things that you can hold, or put on the wall, or just keep in a box that you might look at in ten years. There’s something so exciting about handprinting, and to have all these physical images. To me, it feels more secure and real than files on a hard drive. I can look after them better this way.

Finnegan Travers

8. When did the idea for this show start? 

Many moons ago. I think, if I remember this right, me and Jesse were printing one day at Assembly in Dalston. I was printing a photo of a red sofa taken in Leeds, behind that sofa was a red radiator. Jesse was printing a photo of a bum or a hand holding a cock, I can’t quite remember. Anyway, we were laughing and talking about how different our images were next to one another and actually really liked it. A week or so later I saw this photo bracken in a deep hue of blue from Celia on the viewing board. Celia’s work needs no introduction. I asked her if she would be interested in putting on a show with us and she said yes.

9. Why hand-print in 2025? What about that process is so important for you?

It’s always about the process, and with printing it really is a whole other process. Once you get on this train, it’s very hard to move away from it too. Holding something you’ve created in your hands, and spending sometimes hours correcting is such a maddening yet beautiful experience. Who wouldn’t want to spend eight hours in the dark during a heatwave?

For me, I see it as a little church-type-place where the community gathers. Each darkroom or lab has its holy figures and instead of the bible, we have boxes of paper and pray to the enlarger gods. We share ideas, thoughts, and just shoot the shit in this sanctuary. Photography is quite a solitary practice for most of us and I think the darkroom gives back in so many ways to that feeling.

10. What’s the difference between photographing a stranger and photographing someone you love?

I’d like to say nothing. I like to think I approach it with the same level of care, but photographing the people you love sits heavy in the soul. There is a sense of foreverness when you photograph someone you love. I have that negative of this special human which will never change, even if they do. When you photograph a stranger, it creates more curiosity, as if there is more to discover and questions are left unanswered. There are times when these strangers become people you love also, and so the cycle continues.

11. What do you think makes something intimate without being obvious? 

I think what’s intimate for me, may not be intimate for you, and I like that. We all have our own interpretations of intimacies and we leave them out there for the world to see and sometimes resonate with. There is an image in the show of two crows dancing over one another on a beach in Ireland. This is very intimate for me.

12. Do you want viewers to understand the context of your images, or is ambiguity part of the invitation?

I trust people to make their own interpretations of the work. It’s a visual language and shouldn’t be spelled out.

13. What does it mean to show this deeply personal work alongside other photographers’ diaries? Do you feel exposed or in good company?

Only in good company! We’re all showing parts of ourselves, so of course it’s exposing. But this is why group shows are important because we all carry the weight together. There should be more group shows in London.

14. What’s the strangest reaction someone’s ever had to your work?

Wanting to buy it off me.

15. What made you decide to show ongoing projects instead of a cohesive series? Was fragmentation the point?

I wanted to share works that took the form of diaries and unseen images. Celia and I talk about this a lot, the way we put images aside in boxes and think, “I’ll use that for something bigger one day” and I think that’s the point here: finding those images and bringing them to light. Although the work may appear fragmented, it’s all connected in some way.

16. Have any of your subjects seen these images in the show? What was their reaction – especially your girlfriend, or your brother? 

For sure they have. It’s difficult to say though, some images of my girlfriend she doesn’t like. I’m sure my brother finds the image of him hard to look at too because it probably reminds him of a hard period in his life.

Jesse Glazzard

17. Do you ever feel protective of the people in your images, or is exposure part of the love? 

I do feel protective but I’m in constant communication with the people in my images.

18. What’s the most impulsive photo you’ve ever taken, and did it make the final cut?

Nothing is impulsive, everything has some kind of intention. It often comes down to how I feel about the people I’m documenting – people I love – and to shoot them is the act of being able to show outsiders how I see that person.

19. What’s the decision behind shooting in black and white?

I found colour so distracting. I like how the subject becomes the main focus in black and white.

20. You mention that your work sits in a “raw diary format”. Did you ever keep a diary growing up?

No, that wasn’t ever really something that I ever learned to access until I was 23 and someone in my life told me that writing about everything was important. Now I keep diaries.

21. Has anything surprised you about showing alongside the other photographers in this show?

What surprised me is how differently we all work. I liked learning what’s important to both of them.