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In an image from her 2026 series The Bone Collector, photographer Ruth holds a sheep's skull to her throat.
A self-portrait series and handmade artist's book, telling my story of recovery from dissociative amnesia due to complex trauma, using the bones of a sheep as symbols of memory and alternative printing techniques to explore the embodied nature of trauma.
A 4 by 4 grid of 16 self-portraits shows the artist in her suffering of flashbacks of psychological abuse.
Visualising flashbacks of psychological abuse, these photographs present fragmentation of memory and identity, and use water as metaphor for the flooding and drowning felt in suffering of this abuse, and the surfacing felt with recovery.
A large rock sits on the ground looking like the skull of an unknown but slightly menacing creature.
What remains, when memory is out of reach? This series represents my mind's revealing of memory fragments, in dreamscapes and the symbolic language of the subconscious.
Photographer Ruth Emily Hanson wears a white dress, white wings and holds a head mask of an eagle in front of her.
Made in the wake of young widowhood, Eagle’s Wings expresses grief and disconnection and tries to find meaning and something tangible in profound loss.
Photographer Ruth Emily Hanson lies on a bed and looks up to the camera.
22:22 is a series of images created at the time of my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID) formerly known as multiple personality disorder, finding visual language for what I didn't quite have words for - fragmentation, amnesia and shifts in awareness, memory and identity. 
A tape measure is wrapped around a woman's neck and is held straight out to the left and out of shot.
An expression of the experience of Anorexia Nervosa, using image composites to represent a duality of suffering, positioning anorexia as both enemy and friend.

Ruth Emily Hanson ARPS is a contemporary fine art and documentary photographer based in Lancaster, NW England

Copyright 2026 © Ruth Emily Hanson

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