Sarah Skinner- designer and photographer

I don't feel that I have much of a choice but to make art, to create things. If I have taken a break from art or dancing for a few weeks, for whatever reason, I begin to get irritable and restless. To feel a sense of achievement I need to have created something solid, something that has physical presence in the world, even if it temporary, like a performance.

As a photographer, the contrasts between movement and stillness are my prime inspirations. Landscapes and nature dominate my earlier work, reflections of private, intimate moments, but when I moved into New York City I struggled for subjects. So many of the more obvious topics seemed to have been covered so often that I felt I had little new to say with them.

My new subject, was, perhaps inevitably, under my nose - my dancing. My love of movement and the transient forms that it creates suddenly seemed not to contradict the still privacy of my landscapes. To capture the emotion of a single moment, to freeze the dancer in a single glimpse in time seemed a perfect marriage of stillness and movement. As a dancer, my understanding of the art not only puts the dancer at ease in the foreign and sometimes intimidating setting of a studio, but it allows me to feel the fleeting structures that the body creates. I can see the line and anticipate the moment that will show me the forms the dancer creates.

With photography I hope to show oriental dancing in a positive vibrant uplifting light - to display its treasures and highlight the self-expression of the individual woman. The dancer takes her power, her energy from the center of the body, the pelvis, and allows it to travel, radiating outward through the body beyond the confines of the limbs. Dance is not just in the hips but also out to the fingertips. Each line and detail exposes the emotion in the dance.

From the quiet monochrome tranquility of my landscapes I have moved to work dominated by the hot, color-strewn zest of the dancer in action. Powerful moments captured and frozen; line and motion reflecting the joy, the inner emotion of the woman within the dancing figure.

My rewards come in the act of creation and in the reaction of the dancers that feel I have reflected them in the way they would wish. Creating an environment in which models feel comfortable and at ease in their self-expression gives me a sense of achievement, while the presentations of an art form I love is a constant inspiration. Oriental dance is often misrepresented and misunderstood, dismissed and characterised as overtly sexual rather than sensual, the subtlety of the movement missed in ugly caricatures. I take Raqs Sharqi and present it as the beautiful and traditional art form that it is.

The beauty of the female form now provides much of my inspiration, I photograph women of all sizes and ages, proving to the world - and to myself - that every woman has beauty innate. When I was first starting out I saw the renowned Gamila perform. At that time she was a mature woman with full-grown grand children. When I saw her perform it was a pivotal moment in my life. I saw a mature woman be the most beautiful, sensual, powerful woman I had ever seen in my life. Belly dancing offers a field of expression for your entire life- as you grow and mature. It is accepting of ages and shapes, that the woman, as she is, is beautiful.

In technical terms I am enjoying the digital revolution. I use a canon D60 digital SLR camera and my computer skills allow me freedom to extract as much as I can from the digital process. Color printing at home is prohibitively expensive and sending the films out to a commercial producer removes me from a critical part of the process. Using the computer gives me the opportunity to manipulate my images into any kind of art. Digital technology still has limits when compared to what can be achieved with a medium and large format camera in terms of the pure quality of the image, but the technology continues to develop as my skills as a studio photographer grow to exploit those developments.

Freezing the moment of dance, capturing the beauty of the woman and her movement