My photography is essentially a documentation of everyday life. It is my digital diary, a record of things that amuse and intrigue me as I go about my daily life. I rarely start a project by thinking, for example, that I want to take a series of photographs of the forest. The material comes together organically, and I generally work by selecting images from my large archive of photographs which has been built up over many years. Some might find this approach lacking in structure, but as the same themes tend to crop up over time, and then slowly come together to evolve into a more coherent body of work.
Archipelago was a series of photographs taken on a trip to the Stockholm archipelago in 2012. It aims to convey the simplicity and beauty of the archipelago landscapes so beloved of the Scandinavians. It was shown at an exhibition at Het Spaans Huis in Tervuren, near Brussels, Belgium in 2014, and a book of the same title was self-published in 2015.
Forest had its origins in a personal trauma. An ex-partner had knowingly abandoned me in a forest, and I was only able to slowly navigate my way out thanks to the photos I had taken. The book went through many permutations and, as I added new images and slowly deleted the traumatic ones, it became a cathartic exercise, and the book and exhibition that emanated from it were significantly different from the original trauma which evolved into something more reassuring and organic.
Citylife / Kairos was a series of street photographs taken on trips in and around the city of Brussels. The exhibition, in the form of 2 friezes (10m + 5m long), which were exhibited in the academie beeldende kuenste anderlecht as part of a group exhibition on the theme Kairos (meaning the perfect moment). The continuation of the project #citylife was shown as the end of year exhibition for the 4th year of my photography studies at the academy.
Sacred & profane is part of an ongoing project exploring the sacred (and profane) in the everyday. Although the project started out with predominantly religious imagery, slowly the images became increasingly abstract. The selection was mainly made by watching peoples’ reactions to the images which, for whatever reason, conveyed something of the sacred or some element of mystery. Although the iconography is fundamentally Christian, the images are timeless. The themes of light, darkness, heaven, hell, bread, wine, blood echo throughout the work, providing us with a rich selection of images with deep connotations to those we find in the history of western art.
’Homage’ comprises a series of images taken after the death of my mother in 2020, just at the onset of Covid (although that was not the reason for her death). I had managed to get back to the UK three days before she passed away, and so I stayed in the family home for a month after her passing in order to clear her belongings. It was very much a way of saying my goodbyes, both to her and the family home (which was ultimately sold), and to work through and fix in images the history of our family life in that house. Photographing her clothing and my parents’ personal affairs helped me to be able to ultimately part with them.