Artist who aims to 'capture small moments of beauty'

Capturing "small moments of beauty" is part of the motivation for a fine art photographer whose work is set to be featured in an exhibition at Cambridge University.

A creative media technician at University College Isle of Man, Sarah Callow has already had her work featured in a book and in a seaside gallery display this year.

In January her work will feature among that of 100 artists in a display over four floors, with images printed onto newsprint to resemble a newspaper spread.

Callow said the project interested her because it was about "challenging the concepts of what it is to exhibit work or what it is to be exhibiting within a gallery".

The Shutter Hub Open, which will be on display at the Alison Richard Building, runs between 13 January and 21 March.

While she said she had been "quite proactive" in trying to get her work more broadly known, she still felt "really lucky that I've been accepted and been selected to do these amazing things".

In choosing the projects to submit for, she said it was about "finding that balance of pushing yourself just enough out of your comfort zone but not too much that you feel like you're drowning".

However, she has recently been drawn to more unconventional displays of her work, like the Return to the Sea exhibition at the Sea Front Gallery in Sussex, which has seen images presented out in the open air on billboards.

"I think I've been very passionate recently about doing something that's more accessible, or trying to reach a different audience, so that really interested me," she said.

"Whatever they get out of it as they experience it is just as important as what I intended to portray when I made the work.

"So I just like to put myself into settings where I can have that conversation, or create that kind of dialogue between me and a potential audience."

That year-long exhibition, featuring a host of international photographers, runs until October 2025.

As well as the displays, Callow has also had an image selected for a new publication, Food Stories, which saw her take some very personal inspiration in the form of a family Christmas tradition.

The image selected was taken at the annual Marown Parish Christmas Afternoon Tea last year.

She explained: "We normally go every year as a family and we have a pre-Christmas get together, and I just took some photos while we were having our afternoon tea, and one of those photos was selected.

"I don't really photograph a lot of food, so I had to find something that was significant to me in some way, or significant to moments with people that were important to me."

However, the less obvious often becomes the focal point of Callow's work.

"I like to look for the things that we might pass by all the time and not pay any attention to," she said.

"Because there are small moments of beauty that just happen all around us all the time and we just don't look at them."

But Callow said the process for most of her work involved "capturing something sort of in a permanent way that's really impermanent".

"It's something that isn't going to last, it's like a split second moment, the way the light falls on a table, or the way somebody looks at that moment and that may never happen again, but you saw it in that moment and captured it in some way that you can recall it and look at it again," she said.

"For me it's just differently framing the world and differently seeing the world.

"I think artistic endeavours of all kinds are important culturally, and for us as human beings we need to be able to explore these facets of ourselves and the world around us, and I think photography does that really well."

Why not follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook, and X? You can also send story ideas to [email protected]