ABOUT

I am by nature an observer and a dreamer. Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) is a persistent influence in my work. When I am standing in space, in the land, I find solace in the idea that “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock”.

Other longstanding inspirations are the Italian photographer, Luigi Ghirri, and the writers, WG Sebald, John Berger, Marina Warner and Rebecca Solnit. In my practice I photograph the world around me, using my camera to narrate my response to specific locations, and the ‘affective geography’ of places.

I am interested in the nature and quality of spatial transformations, what they look like, what they change, how they reshape the lived environment and the wider consequences of changes that rob us, and our children, of routine connections to nature. So I often think of Sebald’s musing about the world “draining itself … the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on” when I’m out in some place witnessing its ‘end of days’ in the last months, weeks, days or hours before it is transformed yet again or disappeared to make way for a new subdivision or infrastructure works, or some other reconfiguration that counts as ‘progress’.

And I seek out local places, sites of resilience and regeneration, edgelands and small, liminal spaces, tuning into the sensory world beneath the surface - presence and absence, light and shadows - the measures of seasonal, cyclical time.

But mostly I make photographs because its my way of looking at the world, and what we have done to it - just trying to make some sense of it all. 

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long;  Walker Evans, photographer, 1903-1975