Survey 2019, Animated lightbox - LED lights, acrylic, custom frame and coal dust Blind Survey, Unique silver gelatin photograms Survey and Blind Survey were exhibited at Verge Gallery in April 2019 as part of the exhibition, Resurfaced Geographies, with Izabela Pluta and Ellen Dahl. These works responded to the idea of landscape photography, with the particular landscape that I responded to being the the Fife coast in Scotland, formerly the site of the Michael Colliery, a former coal mining site that my Grandfather worked in during the post war years. The landscape as it was at the time of mining is no longer, the architecture of the tunnels underneath the feet still in existence, but hidden from view. I approached this site seeking some visual clues to what had gone before, scanning the ground like a survey. the bosy of work ties into my enduring interest between what can be seen and what cannot.
       
     
Work / Survey
Installation view - Wellington St Projects, Nov 2018 Isophase I and II and 56°26.1' N 2°23.1' W aim to highlight the symbiotic relationship between photography and the lighthouse, both materially and conceptually. Where a lighthouse throws light out into space to communicate in code, photography is a catcher of light, rendering light into a two-dimensional communication form.
       
     
Work / Isophase
       
     
Work / I just have this feeling
I nstallation view Peacock Gallery, Nov 2018. Afterglow and The Last Touch are interconnected works that explore relationships between light, dark, time and chance. The LED light sculpture was laid upon photographic paper to make the lumen prints and photograms that make up the photo collage. The two works create an installation that explores illumination in both a three-dimensional and two-dimensional rendering. Through variations in developing times, the touch of the light onto the photographic paper either reveals or conceals what has been laid upon it.
       
     
Work / Afterglow
Installation view, Perth Centre for Photography, July 2017 In the Phantom Island series, a collection of animated lightboxes aim to draw parallels between the idea of the self and the notion of a phantom island – an island that has been mapped but subsequently proven to not exist.
       
     
Work / Phantom Island
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Work / Dead Reckoning
Installation view - Airspace Projects, May 2018 As part of the collaborative exhibition ‘A Line around that we cannot see’ with Karen Golland and Heidi LeFebvre.
       
     
Work / Laying Light
Moving Portrait is a live interactive portrait that captures a likeness of the viewer as they stand in front of the work. However, this likeness is only given when the viewer is moving - if they stand still, they disappear into a void of blackness. This work is a part of an ongoing project that aims to in push at the boundaries of portraiture and explore the evolution of the notions of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ as influenced by evolving technological heterotopias. Moving Portrait examines the ways in which the screen acts upon notions of self and the way in which the self is acted out upon the screen. This portrait explores the oscillation between stasis and flux in being and performing self, onscreen and online.
       
     
Work / Moving Portrait
Where Are You is an interactive portrait that seeks to question the notion of being-in-the-world. Taking the form of a sculptural object that acts as a mirrored viewing portal, the work beckons the viewer to find themselves in the frame. However, the ‘portrait’ offered is a transient one, where the viewer dissolves into their surroundings and disappears altogether. The work is part of an ongoing exploration of the changing nature of the notion of ‘self’ in the evolving technological heterotopia and an interrogation of the boundaries of portraiture. This disobedient ‘selfie’ questions – where are you when you cannot see yourself?
       
     
Work / Where are you
'Are You There' is an interactive work that explores portraiture and its intersection with the notion of place. Consisting of an oval shaped mirror sitting atop an elongated plinth, Are You There is an interactive artwork that was designed to be deliberately mimetic of the human form. The plinth acts as the body, and the mirror acts as a head. The work stands in the gallery space like a humanoid structure, standing still until activated by the proximity of a person attempting to see their reflection. Then, through facial detection software programmed to interact with a micro camera embedded in the mirror frame, the mirror turns away from the face presented to it and denies this reflection. The mirror, by turning away from the person who approaches, is saying ‘no’. This mirror denies us our self-image and appearance.
       
     
Work / Are you there
'Hello' consists of two robotic animated lightboxes that explore the relationship between people, place and light. 'Hello' is a portrait that depicts no trace of a human body or face, rather it is suggested, or ‘simulated’ through the rounded aperture through which the light emits. Taking this simulation further, and in a way to amplify the humanoid qualities of the piece, I programmed morse-code into the light boxes, so that each one attempts to communicate to the other and also to the audience.
       
     
Work / Hello
Here/There (2014) is a series of 13 photographic portraits that explore the intersection of portraiture and place though the act of looking. Each of my subjects was wearing a virtual reality gaming mask with the ‘game’ being viewed actually just a simple dimensional exploration program of a house interior. With the mask in place, the head movements of each subject dictated what they saw in each room, replicating real life visual exploration, e.g. if they looked up, they would see the ceiling, if they look down, they would see the floor, etc. I chose to photograph my subjects exploring an immersive virtual environment in order to look at the act of looking at place and to illustrate the sense of slipping between worlds that occurs between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ and ‘place’ and ‘being’.
       
     
Work / Here There
Echo is a work that acts as a disobedient mirror and an unreliable portrait. Through simple programming and a microprocessor embedded in the work, Echo alternates between being a reflective mirrored surface in which viewers can locate themselves, to a beaming light portal, where all reflection is lost. The circle of light that emanates from the work is a reductive ‘portrait’ that comments on the likenesses and connections between the human and the humanoid and seeing and being seen. Echo continues my interest in pushing at the boundaries of portraiture and exploring the evolution of the notions of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ as influenced by evolving technological heterotopias. Portraiture, as a mode of art making, is reflective of the changing notion of self through time, and Echo as a portrait addresses this in the age of the almost-ubiquitous selfie and the ever-increasing influence of online and virtual worlds.
       
     
Work / Echo
You’re Here is series of photographic portraits that utilise the trope of a circular mirror as a stand in for human presence. The scale of the mirror mimics the dimensions of a face and acts not only like a humanoid rupture in an empty space, but also as a frame through which space becomes place.
       
     
Work / You're Here
‘Gone But Not Forgotten: A Mourning Survey’. Three channel site specific installation at FraserStudios 2012.
       
     
Work / Gone But Not Forgotten
In A Loved One Sleeping , I photographed the capricious collection of objects that were left behind at the Fraser Studios in Sydney after the building was just about to be handed back to the developers. This odd collection of ephemera – bricks, string, milk crates, and trestles somehow became supercharged memorials to what was. These inanimate objects, lying abandoned where they fell, acted as stand-ins for lived experience. I framed them in a formally constructed, central position within the photograph, positioning them between landscape and portraiture. My intention was that these object ‘sitters’ would suggest transient and unseen human presences and that the works would speak of the shifts and slips that play out in a dynamic built environment.
       
     
Work / A Loved One Sleeping
'The Path of Totality' - 2013 A-M Gallery. ‘The Path of Totality’ is an exhibition of photographs and animated lightboxes that draw upon the experience of a total solar eclipse captured in 2012. The works are a poetic meditation upon the notions of vision, awareness and locational identity.
       
     
Work / The Path of Totality
       
     
Work / I Think This is The Place