Your House is on Fire

• Photographer
  Sara Hannant, United Kingdom
• Website
  http://www.sarahannant.com

Your House is on Fire

Ladybird, ladybird fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children will burn

Your House is on Fire is a collection of photographs that record fire interventions to
vintage Ladybird books. The pages are strategically lit or immersed into the fire so that
the flames momentarily illuminate, enliven or disrupt aspects of the illustrations,
animating new readings of the familiar children’s stories.

The element of fire is employed as a creative force in re-visioning female protagonists as
portrayed in classic fairy tales. The photographs capture the character or scene
transformed by smoke, smoldering or engulfed in flames, and vestiges of the pages are
rendered among the ashes.

Fire—a symbol of hearth and home, destruction, trial, purging and purification—opens up
the narratives to consider personal and cultural mythologies that bear relationship to
dreams, desires and memory.

Sara Hannant's photographic practice is open to the unexpected, the uncanny, and the unseen. Her work is informed and transformed by witchcraft, magic, and folklore. She recognises the diverse expressive qualities of photography and uses analogue, digital, and alternative processes.

Her books include 'Of Shadows: One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic' (Strange Attractor Press, 2017) and 'Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey through the English Ritual Year' (Merrell, 2011), which became a Horniman Museum touring exhibition.

Awards 2023 Siena Creative Photo Awards, Fine Art: Experimental, Shortlisted
2023 20th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Professional Cell Phone Series, Winner
2022 19th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Alternative Processes Series, Winner
2022 18th Pollux Awards, Alternative Processes, Series, Winner
2022 17th Pollux Awards, Alternative Processes, Series, Winner
2022 18th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Alternative Processes, Series, Runner-up
2021 17th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Alternative Processes, Series, Runner-up
2021 Selected Best of Show International Photography Awards, IPA Jury Top 5 and Country Pick: United Kingdom
2021 International Photography Awards, Professional Analog/Film, Other, 2nd Place
2021 PX3 – Prix de la Photographie, Paris, Fine Art, Nature, Honourable Mention
2020 15th Pollux Awards, Alternative Processes Series, Winner
2020 Siena Creative Photo Awards 2020, Shortlist
2019 British Photography Awards, Documentary Photography, Shortlist
2019 British Life Photography Awards 2018, Urban Life, Documentary Series, and Photojournalism, Shortlist