The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows takes as its starting point Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, a Victorian-era Welsh astronomer and photographer whose work and family archive have remained largely outside the photographic canon. Sophy Rickett, the book’s photographer and author, spent time with the sprawling Dillwyn Llewelyn papers—letters, images, and records accumulated across generations—and the resulting book is as much about the difficulty of reading such an archive as it is about the woman at its centre. Published by GOST Books in 2019, the volume is clothbound with a foil-debossed cover; its 80 pages hold 41 photographic works, a mix of images made on the Gower Peninsula, studio-based photographs, and found archival material. That combination matters: Rickett does not present herself as a neutral custodian of Dillwyn Llewelyn’s legacy, nor does she claim to recover a lost figure whole. Instead, her photographs and text move between landscape, still life, and reproduction, testing how a contemporary artist might think alongside a predecessor whose interests in astronomy and image-making rhymed with her own.
Kenfig Burrows, the dune system on the South Wales coast, gives the project its title and its recurring atmosphere. The place is not simply a backdrop; it is a site where Rickett’s own photographs meet the historical record, and where the landscape’s shifting ground becomes a figure for archival uncertainty. Readers who know Rickett’s earlier work will recognise her attentiveness to light, surface, and the instability of the photographic subject. Here those concerns are folded into a longer historical span, as Dillwyn Llewelyn’s scientific and photographic pursuits are approached obliquely rather than monumentally.
The book’s significance for a collection lies in this doubled perspective: it is both a focused study of a little-known Victorian woman practitioner and a meditation on influence, inheritance, and the partial nature of any archive. The design—compact, tactile, and restrained—supports that reading rather than overselling it. For collectors of contemporary British photography, particularly work that engages with photographic history without treating it as a sealed chapter, this is a considered and rewarding volume.
