A Spider Swung Six Times… is a body of work produced during a month-long teaching artist residency in Sanquhar, Scotland, in the upper Nithsdale region. The project unfolds through five interconnected works—The Soothsayer, The Witch, The Banshee, The Queen, and The Dragon—comprising a total of twenty-five vertical panels. Together, they draw from regional folklore, historical residue, and deliberate invention to examine how stories are carried by landscape and sustained through repetition, belief, and misremembering.

Nithsdale is a place where myth remains embedded in the physical world. Rivers, mills, forests, and domestic spaces hold overlapping histories of labor, violence, devotion, and survival. Within this context, folklore does not function as a closed narrative from the past, but as an active system—one that continues to shape how a place is felt. The works in this series do not attempt to illustrate specific legends or historical events. Instead, they operate in the unstable space where fact, rumor, and imagination coexist.

All images were made using a custom-built camera designed for a four-to-one vertical aspect ratio. The format resists conventional photographic horizontality and instead recalls standing figures, architectural columns, or devotional panels. This physical orientation slows the act of looking and encourages a bodily relationship to the work. The photographs were shot on Ferrania P30 film, derived from an Italian motion picture stock and selected for its cinematic tonal depth, pronounced contrast, and characteristically crushed blacks.

Exposures were long—ranging from a minimum of five seconds to as much as thirty seconds—and made hand-held. This method allowed breath, subtle bodily movement, and the ambient “movie light” of the environment to register within the image. Rather than correcting for instability, the process embraces it, allowing time itself to become visible. The resulting photographs hold a sense of duration and quiet tens