Photographs | Michael Scott Hand

In October of 2014, not long after my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I stood outside with a Corona in my hand and watched the most violent and majestic lightning storm I have ever seen strike arcs across the city.

At the time my partner and I were renting a house on the side of a hill: a ramshackle building that groaned and shook alarmingly when the gully winds swept down from Mount Lofty.

It was from this precarious position, atop the weakening, untreated planks of wooden decking that I was afforded an extraordinary view of the storm in all its hideous brilliance; each bolt of lightning blasted away the darkness and cast the world in strange, electric shades.

The lightning that night matched the unspeakable terror that I was feeling. On the precipice of loss, on the knife edge of grief I was yet to experience: the lightning gave form to my pain and writ it large across the city for everyone to see.

I took four photographs that night.