“A colourist at heart, the wellspring for my practice is in recording the essence of the purest colour contained within light. My cameraless photography addresses the relationship between how we view and experience the intangible in an age increasingly defined by technology. I enjoy exploring the vast, elemental landscape of my home on Dartmoor. I am also very interested in geometric abstraction and colour theory.
My work has a visual simplicity that belies the complex process of creation. In my daily ventures into the art and science of trapping coloured light directly on paper, I am striving for a visual and physical means of experiencing the rich intensity of prismatic colour and keeping it for posterity. To this end, another passion of mine lies in perfecting working methods that allow me to perfectly distil the purity and luminosity of light as I record it on paper during fleeting exposures made in the pitch-black blind space of my darkroom. This is achieved in the act of analogue darkroom processing with a very particular set of chemical formulae and light sensitive emulsions; tweaked and adjusted continuously in almost 2 decades of research and practice in my colour laboratory.
I primarily make work with experimental cameraless photographic mediums such as luminograms, photograms and cliché verre prints in my darkroom. I'm interested in exploring alternative and historical processes, and passionate about my substantial stockpile of out-of-date peel-apart polaroid film. I love printmaking and painting for sketching my ideas, so I can occasionally be found making monotypes, screenprints and linocuts or gleefully throwing colour at canvas.”
Born in Hertfordshire, England, I was raised in Southern Africa, returning to the UK in my teens to finish school in Wales.
Green Island Studios is my colour darkroom and studio space, I received my Masters Degree (Distinction) in Photography: Critical Practice from University College Falmouth in 2004. From October 2010 to June 2011, I was the Artist In Residence (AA2A) at Plymouth College of Art. Since my first show in 2000, my work has been regularly exhibited and sold internationally.
I have a side project making smart phone photographs. You can view the photos for this project on Instagram here and buy the book, "Smart Phone, Smart Photography" at high street book shops and online book sellers worldwide.
“There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.”
“As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct colour effects are never done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.”
Find me here….
- GRANTS AND AWARDS -
2016 - Arts Council England - Grants for the Arts Award.
2015 - DNPA 'Your Dartmoor Fund' Grant - Project Funding Award.
2010 - AA2A - Artist in Residence Scheme - Plymouth College of Art.
2008 - Saatchi Gallery & Harper Collins Publishers - Finalist -Book Cover Design.
2006 - Unlocking Cornish Potential - Graduate Placement Award.
2004 - Fenton Arts Trust Grant - Project Funding Award.
2003 - Arts Council England - Creative Development Award.
2003 - West Midlands Arts - Funding Award.
2002 - Arts Council England - Creative Development Award.
2002 - West Midlands Arts - Funding Award.
“Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.”
“I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.”
