In the year that Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a police officer on duty, at least 146 other women were killed by men in Britain – but how many of their names can you remember?

Six months earlier Sarah’s death in 2021Another woman was murdered near documentary photographer Jude Wall’s home and she was shocked by the unequal media attention.

This was the trigger for a photography project in which she has so far visited 15 places where murdered women were buried in shallow graves.

“I’m interested in how much of them still exist,” said Ms. Wall. “What traces they leave behind, what little magical things they leave behind that we aren’t aware of, that we don’t notice and don’t see.”

Ms Wall, who lives in Swansea and teaches photography at Cardiff Metropolitan University, said on average a woman is killed by a man every three days in Britain, yet most of their stories go unheard.

She described the photographs she takes as “memorials” whose goal is to spark conversation.

“This is not angry data, it’s ‘look, this is happening, there’s still a big problem here,'” she said.

Ms Wall locates the former gravesites using press photos, local stories and flowers left on posts, but said she has learned to recognise “very clear signs”.

At the beginning of the project, she spoke to a forensic botanist about visible changes in plant life at burial sites and uses this knowledge to “get a sense of where things have been disturbed or otherwise slightly altered.”

“I thought something must have happened to the soil they were in. So I started taking pictures of the spots, digging up soil and picking out flowers that seemed unusual… I didn’t really know what to do with them, so I started freezing them in my freezer,” she said.

Her work does not name the women or provide details of their murders, but includes grid references as well as photographs of the former gravesites and frozen flowers.

It also uses soil chromatography, a photographic technique that reveals the chemical, physical and biological properties of the soil.

“You can feel a presence, you can feel an atmosphere, you can feel something when you’re there,” she said.

Keen to learn more about landscape changes at burial sites, she recently visited the Texas Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, a 65-acre open-air human decomposition research laboratory on Texas State University’s Freeman Ranch.

Here, corpses are donated and left in the landscape so that they can be studied to solve murder cases.

She was given access to the experts stationed there, to the meadow where the bodies lay, and was allowed to take soil samples from beneath the bodies.

“It confirmed a lot of what I already thought, that these marks remain, not in terms of bodily substance, but that something in that room is permanently changed and that person is brought back to life,” she said.

When asked if the experience had frightened her, she said she had been convinced by the idea that “the bigger picture was more important.”

She added that the bodies were in varying stages of decomposition, with some slightly buried and others not.

“Occasionally the smell would come, but not very often. Of course there are things like maggots that we all don’t like to think about… but nothing ever felt horrible or like a horror movie.”

She said there was a quiet, calm and peaceful atmosphere at the burial ground.

“It’s not that you dehumanize them, but you start to notice other things … there are just these really haunting colors and tones that I guess you don’t expect to see,” she said.

“There are butterflies everywhere, there is just life here.”

After her return from Texas, she plans to visit more British gravesites and eventually create a book and exhibition.

The response to the project has been positive, she said.

“A lot of people say it’s really necessary, and that’s nice,” she said.

“I think my son said, ‘Why do you have to be yourself?'” she laughed. “He’s 21, but he’s not sidelined.”

She acknowledged that her often “desperately sad” project was emotionally taxing, “as it is for everyone,” but said she was driven by a desire to “change the narrative” to Femicide.

“People need to be more aware of how common this is. I’m really just trying to get people thinking,” she said.

She said her project was about remembering the lives of murdered women.

“It confirms their existence, their life, who they are.”