"The Twenty Collection was my very first body of work and exhibition which was created early on in my career. It came about after a meeting with an architect who was interested in my work and asked if I could fill her, soon to be opened, new gallery space with a new body of black and white work. I agreed to look at the space and then she added that there was a very tight restriction on timeframe as she needed the work to be hanging within one month. The gallery was a beautiful contemporary space full of light and blank walls to fill so I took, what was a very good opportunity, and accepted the challenge. I decided, as there was a very real pressure on the timing, that I would use this to my advantage rather than seeing it as a problem turn into something interesting. So I created the project, The Twenty Collection -- 20 images, taken within 20 days, within a  20 km radius. This gave me 10 days to produce the prints and hang the framed works in time for the deadline. In my inexperience I didn't know that this would have seemed an impossible deadline to most. But I naively took on the challenge and got to work immediately. The images were all taken in Perthshire, Scotland where the gallery was located, so the work had a beautiful relevance also to the space and it is a beautiful part of the world so I had many interesting places to photograph. The parameters helped me in fact, giving some further restrictions gave the discipline for the works and pushed me to find ways to gather the images, photographing at early hours of the mornings and often late into the evenings, discovering things that I would not otherwise have found. The story was also very nice as a press piece and received a good amount of exposure. The work was successfully completed edited, printed and framed all just in time for the opening exhibition, which was a great success."

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Grace Lambert-Phillips