Artist's statement

I make each and every image out of my curiosity about the final result. The uncertainties of natural light and chemical process will bring their freedom to my progress.

A major part of my work derives from the title "Shadow Catchers" of an exhibition of cameraless photography in 2010. Since then my focus of research has been on the identity and movement of shadows, in particular shadows that invite our efforts to catch them. Like a wildlife photographer, I have run after them to catch them in rare moments of their individual action: in some attempt to answer the question what would my, equally your shadow do if it could slip the leash tying it to your foot.

A more recent aspect of this research has been to look at the disruption of Shadow in the conventional dialectic of Figure and Ground. I could argue that Shadow is a more natural counterpart to Ground, these being both of the 2D world and because in painting or photography the Light that reveals Figure is practically limited by Shadow. This direction of research means that I study the floor of the scene in great detail and how it responds to shadow and the surrounding 3D world of figure and its attendant narrative.

My MA final submission at Winchester School of Art, 2014 followed through another line of reasoning based on ideas developed by the German Romantic philosophers among others Fichte, Novalis and Kant on appearance. Using invisible UV lighting, "black light" I explored the development of shadows by objects that were not illuminated of themselves. An examiner from the University of Southampton wrote

The uncanny movement of the shadowy figures is suggestive and evocative and, with an economy of means, brings to mind all manner of social situations involving people in space. The blue space of these shadows is equally suggestive. It creates a sublime context for our imaginations to inhabit.

I should characterise my work as establishing a tangential narrative, what I expect and what I get are separated by their common progression from the starting point. I, intellectually naturally try to reconcile my experience in terms of a continuity of experience from the initial moment, meanwhile the work enjoys a centripetal continuity of purpose. Neither is right, neither is wrong -- we obtain a difference between the alternative frames of reference.
In this sense of promoting all possible interpretations of the image I continue to work in analogue photographic methods. I take responsibility for every exposure, there being no 'delete' button on the camera and often come back to that image, initially disregarded that speaks loudest of the diverted story line.