Artist statement
I am an artist working with photography and digital collage.
My photography captures both natural and urban landscapes, from ancient sites to edgelands, and derives from solitary walks in nature or psychogeographical wanderings in cities. I am interested in how we interact with our environment and how it speaks to us: do we engage with it purely at face value, or can we learn to perceive deeper qualities – stories, even – that might initially escape our attention?
The photographs either stand alone or form the basis of my collages, which consider further what our relationship with our surroundings could be, by channelling the weird, the liminal and the illusional. Through the addition of elements from other sources such as vintage illustrations, my original photographs – visual representations of our known world – are transformed into spiritual and imaginal realms as I explore the connections between the human and the more-than-human. I imagine what might lie beyond that which we can perceive with our senses, creating fantastical scenes of natural and urban dreamscapes, evoking alternative ways of engaging with the universe and the spirits & creatures that are our fellow travellers within it.
I am as inspired by other art forms as I am by visual art: the fiction of writers such as Philip Pullman and Jeff VanderMeer, the films/TV of David Lynch, and art in alternative contexts such as tarot, album covers & gaming, have all provided inspiration for my visions.
Artist biography
Born in Lincolnshire in 1970, I did not pursue art as a child. This may be because (as recently discovered school reports indicate) I was absent from a number of art classes in order to attend peripatetic music lessons. I will never know whether life would have turned out differently had I not followed the path of violin and flute to an ultimate dead end – but, happily, art was not quite done with me. It took a while but, during the Covid pandemic of 2020 onwards, with time on my hands, I began to take photographs while on my many walks out in nature and, to a lesser extent, around town. Alongside this I signed up for an online collage class, and thus the seeds of my current practice were sown.
In 2024-2025 I undertook the intensive Artist Development Programme offered by Nimble (then Hastings) Art School, which plunged me headlong into the world of the ‘proper’ artist. Despite wrestling with a significant dose of impostor syndrome, through this course I started to experiment with my work, learned how to write about it, and gained the confidence to submit pieces to exhibitions. I have since had work displayed in various shows/galleries and have even sold a couple of photographs.
Life has thrown me a few curveballs since the pandemic, and I am currently planning a move to an area that I hope will be vibrant for my art and fulfilling for my personal life.