Artist Bio

Dawn Rodgers grew up in the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Dorset and much of her childhood, was steeped in the folk tradition of those two places. A family of coal miners and sailors, superstitions and stories, filled her formative years.

Rodgers is a visual artist and photographer. Since the sudden loss of her brother on Remembrance Day in 1993, her work has been rooted in grief and in the long process of learning how to live alongside it. Photography is how she gives form to what can’t always be spoken, and to how loss sits in daily life.

Through her photographic practice, Rodgers explores bereavement and the deep connection to the natural world: to landscape, place, and the environments that surround and sustaining inform who we are. She is drawn to the ways loss changes how we understand ourselves, and our place in the world. How the loss of land and the loss of a loved one can mirror one another, both reshaping identity, memory, and belonging.

She draws on mythology, geology and folklore as ways of approaching what feels hard to name. Her current body of work, Erthed, grew from this research and considers the “other place” found in stories and in the land itself: woods, caves, twilight, and the pull of what lies beneath the surface.

In 2022, she completed an MA at Falmouth University with Distinction. She self-published her first book, Sorrow (sold out), and her work has been featured in Le Monde and El País, where Sorrow was recognised as a photobook of 2024. She took part in the East Meets Masterclass Programme (Grain) and exhibited at FORMAT Festival in 2025.