between lineage and light
all my life i have been surrounded by other peoples visions of home.
i grew up surrounded by homes imagined and built by my father. a child moving through spaces shaped with intention, beauty, love and care. home was never an abstract thing to me. i knew what it felt like to belong somewhere. i knew the comfort of beautifully designed family homes filled with texture, atmosphere, and memory.
there was one home in particular. maybe my favourite one in many ways. where i would tie my little boat in the river on the back doorstep. this image has stayed with me my whole life and shaped so much of who i am. the stillness of the water beside the house. living in rhythm with the ebb and flow of tide. the feeling that adventure and shelter could exist side by side. perhaps that was where it all began. my understanding that home could hold both freedom and grounding at once.
i come from a family of builders, architects, and makers of space. my sisters have built more homes than i can count on my fingers. and building was already a language living inside me long before i understood it professionally. when i stepped out of school and into the industry it felt like returning to a language i already knew.
with my supervisors licence — a story for another day — i found myself deeply woven into the process of creating homes for others. writing contracts, liaising between builders, architects, artisans, and clients. walking through unfinished structures covered in dust and possibility. watching stone arrive. watching walls rise. watching light enter spaces for the very first time. and eventually handing over the keys.
again and again i stood at the edge of other peoples beginnings becoming.
witnessing their dreams becoming tangible.
alongside this my photography and writing became another way i moved through the world of architectural residences, hotels and homes. i document spaces for stories, magazines, interviews, and publications, always searching for the feeling within them. the soul of a room. light. the emotion carried in materials. the atmosphere that cannot quite be explained but can always be felt. and somewhere within all of that i think i was quietly searching for my own place too.
in some ways our sailboat. our lady of the sea. became our first home together. a drifting sanctuary between sea and sky. a home untethered to land. shes keeping the rhythm of the tides and patiently waiting for us on home waters in australia.
the moment jamal and i stepped into our ancient earth home. hidden quietly within a small village on his ancestral land on the edge of the fields. something shifted inside me in a way i cannot fully explain. for the first time i am no longer shaping somebody elses sanctuary. this time the keys are ours. and perhaps that is why it moved me so deeply. because after years spent building, organising, documenting, and witnessing the homes of others, i suddenly find myself standing inside our own beginning.
our first home built from earth itself. a home where the walls breathe with time.
where silence still exists. where morning light moves slowly across ancient textures like something alive. where the air carries the coolness of stone and earth before the heat of the day arrives. a photographers dreamland yes. but also something far deeper than beauty. a return to lineage. to land. to memory. to ourselves.
the two of us arrived here carrying different landscapes within us. the sea, movement, ancestry. and somehow this quiet earth home gathered them all together the moment we saw it. something already knowing us.
for most of my life home was something i admired, built for others, photographed, or drifted beside. and for the first time, i understand what it means to be held by a place.
love and colour.
sarah jessica marie burns xx
