Artist's Statement

My photographs are made with a pinhole camera, offering an unsettling, enigmatic perspective on the “natural” world. The work exploits the ambiguous and transformational stance of the pinhole photograph to present confrontations between fiction and reality, the possible and impossible, the natural and unnatural.

Natural Histories (2004-6) is a series of remote and unnerving landscapes. Whether island, forest, mountain range or field of standing stones these landscapes stand outside of any specific time, culture, or society; yet they feel strangely familiar. As the frequent settings for myth and story, they prick our unconscious memory and speak to us of our essential selves. In more modern times our innate attraction to these “wildernesses” also reflects our obsession with escaping the civilised, urban existence or being the first to discover some innocent corner of the world still untainted by tourism. But the series also questions whether deserted wilderness can ever really exist when it must always be inhabited by (and find its power in) the imagination of the viewer. It is finally appropriate then that the landscapes in these photographs do not exist in reality either - they are intricately constructed models and sets; the products of memory or daydream, photographed in my studio.

The real and the imaginary is further confused in the two series Metamorphoses (2003-06) and Deaths (2002-04). Whether the narrative starting point is specific or obscure, these series are concerned with different states of physical transformation, as well as the transforming effect of the pinhole camera. In Metamorphoses, strange hybrid creatures are involved in a process of change or evolution.  Limbs, tails, feathers and flesh tangle before our eyes over the course of one long exposure, so that the viewer is unable to decipher where a body begins or ends, where it separates or entwines with its natural surroundings, and whether the species  itself is human, plant, animal or some combination thereof. But rather than diminishing the creature’s physical power, its unresolved form becomes an expression of creativity and potential. Similarly in Deaths, elegiac and iconic images of dead woodland animals bring the viewer into a rare and stark confrontation with wild creatures. And while they may be stripped of life, somehow death and its depiction only enhances the compelling and urgent intensity of their physical presence.