Gallery
My creative practice is multidisciplinary. I employ photographic techniques, painting, printmaking, and drawing to produce digitalised and analogue one-off artworks. My subject matter is usually taken from real locations, communal or private spaces where I produce an ‘interpreted’ account of their reality – flipping between the actual and imaginary and the connections formed between surface and image, via my multidisciplinary methodology.
I explore different methods of printing or fixing an image to a surface as ‘the surface’ for me is a key component to the making process and any outcomes which I may derive as viable.
Prior to studying painting at undergraduate level, I worked as a paste-up artist for a greeting card company before the introduction of Macs and I was fortunate to grow up in a household with drawing boards and civil engineering plans alongside a functioning and creative back garden. I love the precision of ‘Rotring pens’ but I also like to explore disruption upon a surface.
Viewing devices and drawing tools for tracing and transforming an image and view are central to my practice. In more recent years; the Pin Hole Camera, Claude Glass, Camera Obscura and Camera Lucida often act as these tools alongside a window, an old OHP, various torch, a graphite pencil, a brush and a crayon.
At undergraduate level I explored the ‘abject and its boundaries in nature’ through the work of Julia Kristeva to inform my practice. I researched Deleuze and Guattari and their description of the imagination and creativity as a rhizome and Foucault on how we classify and read an object or work of art. For the past 15 or so years I’ve continued to explore nature; what is imagined and what is real and but I have expanded my outlook to include gardens and the wider landscape as a more politicised genre; land allocation and use, communal and private spaces, overlooked or under-utilised spaces. I try to pinpoint my personal experience to these spaces as well as our collective and often communal relationships. Viewing devises provide a new creative perspective on these surroundings and when I teach, I reference techniques that Josef Albers employed to assist with the ‘opening our eyes’ I like to engage with this belief in my own practice too. Since my Masters degree I have used Silver Gelatine emulsion to explore image and surface in the photographic darkroom as well as the cyanotype harnessing the sun. I currently work on archival grade paper or hand made paper, linen canvas and well as via digital and analogue photographic paper surfaces.
To summarise, I make Art, I teach Art, I teach English as a second language and I work as a Gardener.
