‘A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

My practice looks at the vacant space, the hollow shell, the skin of things. I am drawn to psychologically ambiguous objects and spaces that are empty but charged and marked by the passage of people and time. I work with large format film, cameraless photography, light painting and other creative techniques to seize the heart of my subjects, to capture their presence and aura.

I'm interested in memory, psychology, and the body. My subjects have an intimate relationship to the body and have been handled and inhabited, they are inanimate but loaded, exposing the affecting remnants of past lives. Resonating Spaces depicts a series of locations which have been used and inhabited but are vacant in the photograph, allowing the viewer in; a confessional, a theatre box, a draped alcove with a bed in it. My photograms of children’s clothes, Skins, are made without a camera, placing the antique garments directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light, the skin cells and body oils of their wearers seeping into the prints, becoming a part of them. My Vessels, dormant containers of rifles and pistols, crosses and medals, evoke hidden narratives and secret histories. The camera becomes an instrument for resurrecting archaic and obsolete objects, turning them into something new, allowing us to observe them and re-evaluate their cultural, political and sentimental meaning.

I want my stark and silent photographs to act as introspective spaces, mirrors for self-examination which trigger our deeper thoughts and feelings, fears and desires. My work deals with absence. When something is missing we unwittingly fill in the gaps, occupying the space with our own lived experience and imagination, drawing from memories and emotions which may be hidden or suppressed. The space becomes a reflection of ourselves, a chance to examine our own minds and perhaps experience some release.


WORKS