Same As It Never Was
The photograph can act like an entrance; it opens the doors and helps us to revisit past memories from another place and another time. An entrance into worlds captured and stilled by photography’s gaze. These envelopes of time can begin to move and be bought to life outside of the frame by the viewer’s own thoughts and personal stories. Pictures can articulate and translate what words sometimes fail to; they can be experienced in an almost primitive way that can play with our subconscious and trigger the forgotten.
Same As It Never Was shows a landscape of memories mapped through a fictitious world. Fragments of a story spill out, in a disjointed rhythm; with no clear path of cause and effect we are left with uncertainty and asked to experience them intuitively. We see glimpses of a narrative and images act as co-ordinates to a boundless whole, left open to possibilities.
2012
Halcion Lounge
The hotel foyer, an ambiguous non-place within modern society, it acts as a gateway to an escape from daily life. A transient space, it is both familiar and strange, creating a sense of rootlessness and stasis. Without our expected markers the experience of time becomes slow and alien, altering our sense of reality. A brief encounter, entrances and exits, the foyer is a gateway to all floors.
2012
Island
The concept of Utopia in every age has in some way been a variation of an ideal past, present or future. These ideas may be imaginary, mythical and religious, or have their foundations rooted in history and other civilisations before them.
Island explores ideas of the desire to be elsewhere, to escape from the here and now and be seduced by the exotic. A search to find a place that exists on the periphery of time and the borders of fiction. A picturesque landscape of wonder tinged with an ever-present shadow. An impossible desire to reach a paradise lost.
2011
Awakened States
The photograph performs as a document of truth within our vast image world, a trigger for personal memories and a vehicle to show a scene and narrate a story; it can share histories both fictional and real.
A mixture of my own and found photographs.
2011
Midnight Sun
A visible darkness, “after the things of nature” beyond the visible there is a metaphysical landscape, one that transcends reality and can exist outside our vision and senses. Midnight sun shows images taken in the Lakeland’s of Finland changed from their natural states. The invisible is made visible through manipulation of the images. Acid colours and strange skies are shown like hallucinations through reversal of the pictures natural colours. The near black vistas taken at daytime are reproduced as if taken at night; light is taken from the image just as the sun fades out to night.
The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle. In the northernmost points of the arctic circle the sun does not set 60 days and night becomes day through the midnight sun. In the winter the sun stays below the horizon throughout the day and gives 30 days of night, the polar night. There is a reversal of what we know as night and day which conflicts with our notions of what is natural.
2014
Hidden
The forest in Finland covers nearly 75% of the country and is Europe’s most densely forested countries. For every Finn there is nearly 4.5 hectares of forest.
Walking into the dense forest the sky disappears and everything slows down. Looking all around there is an impression of all the views being alike and fading into one. The trees operate like curtains that conceal any view and sense of depth. The horizon is hidden, each direction becomes indistinguishable and there is a feeling of being immersed in the forest.
2013
Looking Glass
The Claude Glass or Black mirror was a small, dark tinted convex mirror used in the 18th century. Bound in a pocket book it was used to reflect and abstract a scene into a more fixed, painterly image like a camera obscura.
Artists and travelers used the glass to capture and contain wild landscapes by turning their back on a scene to view its dark tinted reflection in the glass like a pre-photographic lens. Named after Claude Lorrain the soft tones and picturesque scenes of the glass reflected that of many romantic painters and helped shape our notions of the picturesque. This small mysterious object gave a phantasmal vision of reality to the holder. The black mirror absorbed the gaze of the user and showed a veiled distorted version of the landscape.
Looking Glass was taken at dusk, a time of transition when the light and colour’s transform a place from being recognisable to one of magic and shadow. Trees and landscapes turn into silhouettes and appear like scenery in a shadow-play. As the light disappears these places, a paradise in the day, take on a sinister air as night approaches.
2012
Between Silence and White Walls
A step back and pause to reflect upon the architecture and spaces we inhabit. A photographic exploration of communal everyday spaces but also sets and stages that represent our reality or an ideal. Places designed for a specific reason or those that fail in their purpose the mundane and bizarre, a look at a hyper real world of a constructed fantasy. Although unpopulated they not only hold the performance of the everyday played within but also stand as mirrors to us as their creators. Taken from their context, silenced without the actions of their purpose these places are subverted and leave us displaced.
2009
Lumen
I can see stars in the water…….
Sunlight on the surface of a lake gives us an opportunity to be mesmerised by its beauty. In a fast paced world nature still has the potential to hypnotise and allows us to meditate and wonder with naivety on its magic.
2013
Abyss
I stood on the edge, I wanted to get lost in the darkness but also in the vast space within the mountains.
The sublime in Romanticism gave the term a sense of infinity and beauty beyond human comprehension. Painters of the time gave pictorial renditions of awe inspiring vistas and all encompassing landscapes with a nature that transcended the figures shown engulfing them with greatness.
The dark sublime turns this notion inward and instead of transcendence it plunges us with a sense of vertigo into a deep gothic place. One of ambiguity, confusion and an uncanny doubling. This dark boundless abyss stares back at you creating both awe and terror.
2022
Within The Rigid Exists Fluidity
“Nature, rather than the machine, should serve as the model for architecture,” Alvar Alto
Deep forests and thousands of cool lakes cover Finland with a quiet beauty. The extremes of cold and dark winters with the long days of light in the summer are all soul forming elements of Finnish life.
A regard for utilitarianism is reflected in Finnish design which embraces sustainability, functionality and a simple beauty. There is a harmony and respect between what is man-made and the natural world. Constructions and materials derived from nature create fluid lines and sculpt the daylight within buildings. These organic forms of the architecture act as a constant reminder of the beauty of nature.
2020
Journey To You
The suburbs of Milton Keynes are hidden by trees and joined via a network of paths and underpasses. With the hum of the main roads above, the rectangles of light seen at the end of the underpass act like a viewfinder to a small snapshot of MK. Although these underpasses can often be seen as dark and sinister places they also connect communities, families, friends and lovers.
2017
Subterraneans
The Moscow metro, built during Stalin’s era to raise the confidence and prestige of the working classes. Today over 7 million passengers pass through its stations every day. Grand structures and opulent design these stations are known as ‘the peoples palaces’.
Subterraneans focuses on the quiet moments between the energy of the crowd. Candid scenes touched with a sense of the cinematic the solitary figures seem to pose lost in their thoughts The metro, although transitory becomes a destination in itself. The platforms act like a stage and the people adopt a statuesque poise, an armour which city life imposes on them.
2013
Returned
Places can communicate a sense of history; they are homes to the past inhabitants and they hold the memories of their past lives. A building or place can emanate a feeling of the dramas that were once played out there with layers of the past stories overlapping. A place that has these connections can evoke our own memories and enable an uncanny sense of being there before.
The photograph is often seen as an uncanny object, capturing and creating a replica of the world stopped in time, giving us at once both presence and absence. For a moment, when we see a photograph we can feel as if we have returned to that scene. There is a haunting sense of déjà vu, that the photograph has offered us a double of the world and that the past is now somehow present.
2016
The photograph can act like an entrance; it opens the doors and helps us to revisit past memories from another place and another time. An entrance into worlds captured and stilled by photography’s gaze. These envelopes of time can begin to move and be bought to life outside of the frame by the viewer’s own thoughts and personal stories. Pictures can articulate and translate what words sometimes fail to; they can be experienced in an almost primitive way that can play with our subconscious and trigger the forgotten.
Same As It Never Was shows a landscape of memories mapped through a fictitious world. Fragments of a story spill out, in a disjointed rhythm; with no clear path of cause and effect we are left with uncertainty and asked to experience them intuitively. We see glimpses of a narrative and images act as co-ordinates to a boundless whole, left open to possibilities.
2012
Halcion Lounge
The hotel foyer, an ambiguous non-place within modern society, it acts as a gateway to an escape from daily life. A transient space, it is both familiar and strange, creating a sense of rootlessness and stasis. Without our expected markers the experience of time becomes slow and alien, altering our sense of reality. A brief encounter, entrances and exits, the foyer is a gateway to all floors.
2012
Island
The concept of Utopia in every age has in some way been a variation of an ideal past, present or future. These ideas may be imaginary, mythical and religious, or have their foundations rooted in history and other civilisations before them.
Island explores ideas of the desire to be elsewhere, to escape from the here and now and be seduced by the exotic. A search to find a place that exists on the periphery of time and the borders of fiction. A picturesque landscape of wonder tinged with an ever-present shadow. An impossible desire to reach a paradise lost.
2011
Awakened States
The photograph performs as a document of truth within our vast image world, a trigger for personal memories and a vehicle to show a scene and narrate a story; it can share histories both fictional and real.
A mixture of my own and found photographs.
2011
Midnight Sun
A visible darkness, “after the things of nature” beyond the visible there is a metaphysical landscape, one that transcends reality and can exist outside our vision and senses. Midnight sun shows images taken in the Lakeland’s of Finland changed from their natural states. The invisible is made visible through manipulation of the images. Acid colours and strange skies are shown like hallucinations through reversal of the pictures natural colours. The near black vistas taken at daytime are reproduced as if taken at night; light is taken from the image just as the sun fades out to night.
The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle. In the northernmost points of the arctic circle the sun does not set 60 days and night becomes day through the midnight sun. In the winter the sun stays below the horizon throughout the day and gives 30 days of night, the polar night. There is a reversal of what we know as night and day which conflicts with our notions of what is natural.
2014
Hidden
The forest in Finland covers nearly 75% of the country and is Europe’s most densely forested countries. For every Finn there is nearly 4.5 hectares of forest.
Walking into the dense forest the sky disappears and everything slows down. Looking all around there is an impression of all the views being alike and fading into one. The trees operate like curtains that conceal any view and sense of depth. The horizon is hidden, each direction becomes indistinguishable and there is a feeling of being immersed in the forest.
2013
Looking Glass
The Claude Glass or Black mirror was a small, dark tinted convex mirror used in the 18th century. Bound in a pocket book it was used to reflect and abstract a scene into a more fixed, painterly image like a camera obscura.
Artists and travelers used the glass to capture and contain wild landscapes by turning their back on a scene to view its dark tinted reflection in the glass like a pre-photographic lens. Named after Claude Lorrain the soft tones and picturesque scenes of the glass reflected that of many romantic painters and helped shape our notions of the picturesque. This small mysterious object gave a phantasmal vision of reality to the holder. The black mirror absorbed the gaze of the user and showed a veiled distorted version of the landscape.
Looking Glass was taken at dusk, a time of transition when the light and colour’s transform a place from being recognisable to one of magic and shadow. Trees and landscapes turn into silhouettes and appear like scenery in a shadow-play. As the light disappears these places, a paradise in the day, take on a sinister air as night approaches.
2012
Between Silence and White Walls
A step back and pause to reflect upon the architecture and spaces we inhabit. A photographic exploration of communal everyday spaces but also sets and stages that represent our reality or an ideal. Places designed for a specific reason or those that fail in their purpose the mundane and bizarre, a look at a hyper real world of a constructed fantasy. Although unpopulated they not only hold the performance of the everyday played within but also stand as mirrors to us as their creators. Taken from their context, silenced without the actions of their purpose these places are subverted and leave us displaced.
2009
Lumen
I can see stars in the water…….
Sunlight on the surface of a lake gives us an opportunity to be mesmerised by its beauty. In a fast paced world nature still has the potential to hypnotise and allows us to meditate and wonder with naivety on its magic.
2013
Abyss
I stood on the edge, I wanted to get lost in the darkness but also in the vast space within the mountains.
The sublime in Romanticism gave the term a sense of infinity and beauty beyond human comprehension. Painters of the time gave pictorial renditions of awe inspiring vistas and all encompassing landscapes with a nature that transcended the figures shown engulfing them with greatness.
The dark sublime turns this notion inward and instead of transcendence it plunges us with a sense of vertigo into a deep gothic place. One of ambiguity, confusion and an uncanny doubling. This dark boundless abyss stares back at you creating both awe and terror.
2022
Within The Rigid Exists Fluidity
“Nature, rather than the machine, should serve as the model for architecture,” Alvar Alto
Deep forests and thousands of cool lakes cover Finland with a quiet beauty. The extremes of cold and dark winters with the long days of light in the summer are all soul forming elements of Finnish life.
A regard for utilitarianism is reflected in Finnish design which embraces sustainability, functionality and a simple beauty. There is a harmony and respect between what is man-made and the natural world. Constructions and materials derived from nature create fluid lines and sculpt the daylight within buildings. These organic forms of the architecture act as a constant reminder of the beauty of nature.
2020
Journey To You
The suburbs of Milton Keynes are hidden by trees and joined via a network of paths and underpasses. With the hum of the main roads above, the rectangles of light seen at the end of the underpass act like a viewfinder to a small snapshot of MK. Although these underpasses can often be seen as dark and sinister places they also connect communities, families, friends and lovers.
2017
Subterraneans
The Moscow metro, built during Stalin’s era to raise the confidence and prestige of the working classes. Today over 7 million passengers pass through its stations every day. Grand structures and opulent design these stations are known as ‘the peoples palaces’.
Subterraneans focuses on the quiet moments between the energy of the crowd. Candid scenes touched with a sense of the cinematic the solitary figures seem to pose lost in their thoughts The metro, although transitory becomes a destination in itself. The platforms act like a stage and the people adopt a statuesque poise, an armour which city life imposes on them.
2013
Returned
Places can communicate a sense of history; they are homes to the past inhabitants and they hold the memories of their past lives. A building or place can emanate a feeling of the dramas that were once played out there with layers of the past stories overlapping. A place that has these connections can evoke our own memories and enable an uncanny sense of being there before.
The photograph is often seen as an uncanny object, capturing and creating a replica of the world stopped in time, giving us at once both presence and absence. For a moment, when we see a photograph we can feel as if we have returned to that scene. There is a haunting sense of déjà vu, that the photograph has offered us a double of the world and that the past is now somehow present.
2016