My work is concerned with expanding the boundaries of photography.
My images are camera - less photographs, produced in the darkroom by hand, with the essential elements of photography - photosensitive paper and light. Removing the camera from the process not only removes an intermediator between the scene and the artist, but also makes the process more immediate and physical.
I wish to rethink and deconstruct the photographic process: image capture, developing, printing and digitalising. By composing in the dark, stretching the development time for an image and treating the photographic paper as an object in itself, I aim to find a new truth in photographic representation.
My work concerns the materialisation of the ephemeral, giving shape and form to the abstract. I am also concerned with how abstraction can tell a story by directly accessing the subconscious. I explore processes that happen without conscious awareness; habits, thoughts and beliefs taken for granted; how much is assumed to be fixed or done in a certain way. What happens when those conventions are changed, when the direction of flow is altered? With awareness, what can be seen that previously was not visible?
I want to show the connection and intersection between photography and other visual art disciplines (such as painting and sculpture), while my images remain, definitively, photographs. To achieve this, I manipulate the properties of colour and time, flex the structure of the paper, and use light as paintbrush.
