Before photographing Giampaolo Speziale, I spent time listening to his music, reading his lyrics and talking with him about the experiences behind his songs.

His music explores deeply personal experiences: the end of a relationship, the uncertainty that follows, the rediscovery of love and the possibility of beginning again. These songs would later become I, his first solo album.

I didn't want to illustrate his songs. I wanted to understand the feelings behind them: the confusion of losing one's bearings, the vulnerability of loving and the hope of finding a way forward. I let those emotions meet my own imagination, without knowing what images might emerge.

A musical instrument became a distant planet. Plants and flowers formed an unfamiliar landscape. In one photograph, Giampaolo stands alone and exposed beneath a strange sky, his body crossed by restless traces of red light. In the other, he is almost swallowed by a garden that seems to both shelter him and hold him back.

Looking at these images, I see something of the emotional journey I found in his music: the vulnerability of loss, the struggle to find oneself again, and the possibility of something new beginning to grow.

The entire scene was physically constructed in the studio, using real objects, long photographic exposures and light painting.

I hoped Giampaolo might recognise something of himself in this unfamiliar world, even as it became something neither of us had expected.

One of the photographs later found its way into the vinyl artwork for I, bringing that imagined world back to the music that first inspired it.