Yoanna Walden (b. 2003) creates photographic work in which elusive dreams, fleeting memories, and ambiguous visions collide. She stages scenes using found objects, DIY props and her own body to express narratives of confinement, constraint and seclusion. Drawing on both personal experience and her autodidactic inquiries she explores systems of control, calling into question the concepts of madness and society’s restrictive views on what it means to be ‘well’. Having left education at the age of 15, she lets instinct and experimentation reign in her creative practice. Although she takes a rigorous approach to her work, she shoots and edits by feel rather than by rule. Through the vivid quality of the worlds she creates and the characters that inhabit them,  a visual language emerges that grounds the philosophical and social themes of her work in an embodied experience.