For the series Virginia I retraced Virginia Woolf’s steps from her house in Rodmell to the river Ouse where she drowned herself in March 1941. This walk embodied an imaginary element as no one really knows how Virginia Woolf got to the river and the precise spot where she drowned herself: she filled her pockets with stones and disappeared into the water. Between Spring and Summer I took that walk many times and started noticing some bodies of water emerging from the fields: swamps and bogs secretly hidden by weeds and other ordinary aquatic plants. The water creates crevices in the land that evokes a ghostly body shape. I looked for Virginia Woolf ’s presence in her beloved landscape and I found her in the water. In my photographs, she became water: I imagined her like a water spirit who inhabits the landscape of the Ouse Valley which once she described ‘an inland sea’.

All images ©Annalaura Palma