ABOUT ME
A graduate of Byam Shaw School of Art at Central St Martins - BA - Fine Art - 1st Class Hons
Thanks for viewing my work. Here are a few words about why I make these and many more images:
Photography quietens my mind and I have a mind that really needs quietening. When I’m looking through the lens of a camera all I’m engaged in is light, form, tone, colour, the collisions of things, how they overlap or interact or reflect in each other. I am completely in the moment and nothing else matters. Being creative also helps to heal me, I have made work about things that I couldn’t really process in any other way. The act of doing this has been immensely therapeutic, regardless of how the work turns out.
Making art gives me hope, it makes life more interesting, whatever I’m working on encourages me to take more interest in everything else. E.g. if I’m obsessed with how shop window displays interact with the reflected world outside, every wander down a high street becomes a fascinating series of endless possibilities with manikins, shoes, commuters and buses all in conversation with each other. If I’m obsessed with how natural and artificial light interact with each other, then a walk or cycle home at dusk becomes a magical journey with streetlights, bedroom windows or passing police cars providing all the drama I could ever want. Being creative is an enormous part of who I am and always will be.
I mostly work with photography, I learnt using film and loved sloshing about in chemicals in the darkroom but I recently gave away my enlargers and tanks etc to a nice couple off of Streetbank and now work mostly in digital. I also draw, paint, have used sound, film and installation.
At different times in my life being an artist has meant different things: As a teenager I broke into tube train depots and painted graffiti art on train carriages, a few years later I was expressing myself through dj-ing and later still through illustration, web design, animation and graphic design. It took me a long time to actually refer to myself as an artist but I’ve always been one.
I graduated from art school in 2009 right as the economic crash was taking hold. It seemed as if creative opportunities were becoming scarcer, austerity had no time for art (although I made a lot of work about the changes I was witnessing). We occupied our art school for a week in protest at what we saw as the stifling, money-driven, bureaucracy heavy, tick-box system that was eroding the spirit of the community based art school that we’d signed up for and ended up in decades worth of debt to attend. In that time we created an alternative, 24 hour art school, one in which we tutored and encouraged each other, collaborated, cooked and ate together, made decisions together as a community. My vision I suppose is to be part of an art movement which is open to the whole community, that isn’t just there to produce the next Turner prize winner, which isn’t concerned about the art market but is outward looking and accessible to all.