Artist statement
My work begins with the camera and culminates with arranging my creations in space. Their existence in space creates a physical experience which is far removed from the original documentary action required to create them, allowing a rendition of reality.
I conceptualize the camera as a visual organ detached from a central nervous system; a disembodied eye unheeding the brain’s habitual commands. While constantly facilitating and inhibiting stimuli, our brain regularly corrects perceptual distortions, turns images imprinted on our retina downside up and creates hierarchies of relevance from what is otherwise an abstract array of physical relations. The camera exposes the relationship between photographers and the physical world.
I find that the core of existential experience is essentially embodied, with an emphasis on how near or how far we are from objects. From this stems the phenomenological aspect of my work. I am interested in the distances between myself and the things around me. Many of my works begin with looking intently at the gap between the ground and the treetops, my hand and the sky, myself and my daughter as I take her portrait. I ‘measure’ this distance through photography and by doing so, eliminate it.
My creative practice consists of prolonged processes of recording the experience of things in the world and re-contextualizing them. I begin by gathering objects, stories and images focused on direct experience, utilizing them to produce new structures of meaning. This, to me, calls attention to the physical properties of photographic materials, so the complete work often contains both figurative and sculptural qualities.
I am drawn to public gardens and wildlife parks, where my camera serves to mediate their observed cultural perception. I edit my work both during and after the photographic process in order to create engineered spaces in which I explore the constant tension between the natural and artificial. In these circumstances, photography serves as a documentary tool, recording the reciprocal effects of technology on biology, while simultaneously creating the world anew.
In my late projects created during the last few years, I have devised a narrative-like conceptual structure for my work process. These projects were meditations on personal past experiences, which further broadened the range of raw materials used, allowing me to compose a new visual framework for the completed works. Welding together images taken some thirty years ago with pictures I made more recently enabled me to undermine conventional hierarchies of past and present, cause and effect; embedded in the way we view the world of phenomena via photographic images.