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Sophy Rickett's work explores the competing forces of light and darkness in defining and articulating space, often alluding to a sense of the infinite. Made mainly at night, and often in peripheral or mundane environments, her work ponders the potential of photography to conceal as much as reveal. In both color and black & white, her photographs cohere around strong formal properties, and are often minimal in character, playing on the latent narrative possibilities of place. This book surveys Rickett's work from the mid-nineties to the present; from her early performative series through to the successive series of nocturnal landscapes, made in the UK, Italy and Japan, for which she has achieved international recognition.

Glyndebourne's new opera house is a striking modernist landmark set against the rolling Sussex Downs. It is also the vehicle for Glyndebourne's internationally renowned and complex productions that involve the coordinated work of singers, musicians, designers, technicians and producers, as well as the planning and synchronization of a mechanical operation that rolls forward on an industrial scale. Sophy Rickett and Ed Hughes's film goes to the heart of this vast production machine. Bringing together the artists' common interest in modernist forms and values in art, and strongly echoing Rickett's earlier photographic work, the film uncompromisingly strips back the operatic space to its architectural and theatrical core, revealing another more minimal drama of spatial plays and simple, slow movement that transforms the interior of the building in a monumental caress of light and shadow. Hughes's musical score overlays the film's formal, grid-like structures with its own elements of line and rhythm while adding further dimensions of musical space and colour. In this way the music reconnects the film to a sense of narrative, one that, complete with found sound and vocal passages, resonates with a history of operatic performance.

An ambitious new video/sound installation work by the artist Sophy Rickett. In the project, provisionally entitled 'To the River', she continues to develop her interest in photography and film's role as a mediator between people and the natural world. The starting point and inspiration is the Severn bore, the tidal wave that famously runs along the River Severn during the moon's equinox.

This volume was inspired by the life and work of Victorian astronomer and photographer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, and her father, John.