Notes on Play is a series of photographs exploring memory, curiosity and the embodiment of play. This series honours the Japanese sensation, Natsukashii (なつかしい), a concept without an English translation. This is the experience of capturing a deep, aching fondness for one’s past: for those places where play and nostalgia dwell.

This experience was sought during my 18 months of immersion in Tokyo, a city where sleek modernism intersects with ancestral traditions and images. With my medium format camera, I set out to capture the remarkable ways Noh masks, robots, castles, dinosaurs and Shinto shrine colours are sculpted into Japan’s playscape.

Having lived in Japan as a child, neighbourhood parks were my habitats for imagining and for connecting to nature. Cicadas called out in the heat of the summer. Dragon flies soared like ancestral spirits (akin to symbols in a Miyazaki film), and winter snow stuck to the tops of swing sets.  

These parks hold my earliest memories of joy, found through play, curiosity and wonder. Feelings I continue to seek and recreate in adulthood.