'From country lanes to kitchen fires, stories in light, ink & flavour.'
I’m Anna, an artist, photographer and journalist creating visual and written stories for magazines, always with a rural touch. Alongside this, I produce culinary features from start to finish—developing recipes, cooking, styling and photographing seasonal, homegrown food.
Based at our farmhouse, where I grow vegetables and keep animals, much of my life and work happens outdoors or in the kitchen. From here I travel—near and far—seeking stories in the countryside, with England a favourite place that feels like home.
After graduating from ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, I worked as a (graphic) designer for international fashion brands. Travel sparked my photography, later refined through studies at the Academy for Photography in Amsterdam.
Raised in the countryside, with a garden, animals and a love of cooking and creating, storytelling has always been at the heart of what I do.
Today, I work with magazines across the Netherlands, the UK and internationally, and I’m currently developing books, culinary series and fine art prints.
Sketches of Light & Land - stories between travel and home
I am currently creating a new platform where I will share stories close to my heart. Sketches of Light & Land will be a personal space for my own work—free, intuitive and deeply personal. While I create commissioned stories in images and words for magazines, here I return to a more instinctive way of working, sharing stories shaped between travel and home.
Launching soon.
A Set of Sketches
How I work
Using my camera as a sketchbook, I travel remote country lanes to tell stories of faraway tales, gathering components like pencil drawn sketches.
I capture the smell of nettles in the spring rain, the sound of the skylarks high above the fields and the taste of freshly picked peas from a kitchen garden. The feeling of cooking over an open fire in the farmyard while watching the wild ponies dance in the summer grass and having purple stained hands from picking blackberries ripened in the late summer sun.
My work is always sketch-like, driven by feeling, in images, words and in my cooking. I capture what I see, but more importantly, what I feel, the soul of a landscape, the natural world, the lives woven within it and the food that is shared.
I pass on the tales told at a farmhouse kitchen table and those shared by the shepherd working high in the hills with his five dogs. I tell the stories of the small farm-to-table farmers working the land in regenerative ways, and the stories of artisans passing down their skills through generations of hands-on crafts. And I tell the story of the seasons through cooking, inspired by the land.
My technique is pure and natural; the subjects and light follow the rhythm of nature. Each image and each sentence is a sketch; nothing has to be perfect, if it captures the essence of the moment, and tells the story I want to tell. My camera is simply a tool, my sketchbook to tell the story.
My journeys always lead me back to my own farm, where images, words, and cooking come together. Growing vegetables and keeping animals flow naturally into my creative process. The rhythm of the seasons and quiet moments on the land inspire everything I do, from photography and writing to the seasonal food I cook inspired by my travels and the kitchen garden on my farm.
Through my work, I hope to reconnect people to the wild freedom within the soul of the land and its unfolding stories. Stories told whispered by the land, in weathered hands and shared meals, like a set of sketches.