ABOUT THE WORK
The life studio teaches an understanding of form, light, and dimension,
The layering techniques available in Photoshop were a revelation.
The images work, I hope, on two levels.
The theme of aging is also important in the textural elements of the work;
A second major theme is the difficulties of communication.
Many of the pictures include the naked figure.
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and here I developed an abiding fascination with anatomy,
the mechanics and moods of the body, and measurement.
A Masters degree in photography began a less literal exploration;
my work began to express very personal philosophies, obsessions,
states of mind and emotions.
Initial attempts at collage had always been restricted
by the given scale and colour of found objects and photographs,
and by the physical problems of attachment;
translucency, too, was not a variable.
In Photoshop, there are no such restrictions.
Images can be compiled from widely differing sources
and fine-tuned with unprecedented subtlety into a coherent whole.
On the aesthetic level of texture, colour and pattern,
the work is often about finding correlations between
natural and manufactured objects in decay.
The laws of physics act equally upon nature and the work of man;
some pictures show nature asserting itself
and reducing man's efforts to their original elements,
while others have nature under threat from encroaching industrialisation.
This latter feeling of weight, crushing, compaction, pinning down
and hemming in, isolation and ultimately of threat,
became elements of the second, emotional level of the work.
the beautiful effects of weathering and distressing
on often very unprepossessing substrates
being at once destructive and creative
carries a paradox mirrored in the aging of the individual.
Any conversation is a microcosm of the dissembling,
misunderstanding and pretence of everyday transactions.
The space between implication and inference,
into which so much of importance seems to disappear,
the gap between the projected and the true self,
the misapprehensions inevitable when thoughts are translated,
more or less efficiently, or not at all, into words -
all these are the subject of much of my latest work.
The nude is a natural symbol of the laying-bare of innermost feelings,
and has been a continuing metaphor in my work.
It can radiate well-being, or vulnerability and weakness;
it can symbolise humanity's deepest essence, or that of the natural world;
it can be idealised, realistic, grotesque, dismembered, impersonal, abstracted.
The endless ways of representing the nude all carry with them resonances
inevitably associated with the depiction of ourselves at our most unprotected.
It has become, for me, a symbol of veracity, lack of pretence, honesty - and vulnerability.
I find images of the nude impossible to ignore.
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