Meeting the residents changed her life, Foster says, but she found herself wanting to make more emotive, abstracted work. “With Serenity, I felt like I was doing what I was expected to do,” says Foster, who adhered to the documentary mode that the setting required, without bringing her own vision into the images. “Now I love that idea of making something seem like a documentary image, but actually I’ve constructed and designed it.”
She entered the MA photography course at the University of the West of England looking to expand her fine-art practice. The tutors encouraged her to take self portraits, while weekly briefs encouraged her to experiment and make non-project work. She also began drawing widely from contemporary photographers, like Thomas Duffield and Kelly O’Brien, whose Are You There? series depicting her elusive father is a particular influence.
She began working with G on text from their transcribed conversations, while also thinking about the setting, staging and choreography of a new series. The result is In Order to Bloom, “a conversational body of work based on two young women and their experiences growing up with mums suffering with alcoholism and addiction,” Foster explains.