Artist Statement

My art practice is a material exploration of—and about—photography. I construct images of the natural and built world using analog darkroom techniques, still-life photography and collage. My projects take form as photographic prints, hand-printed artist books and collages made from my photographs. Subjects include outer space, architecture, plants, gemstones and rocks. 

Today, photographs are increasingly screen-based, disposable and everywhere. My work responds to this direction by considering ideas related to time, materiality and reality in photography.

In my ongoing project, To See The Moon Fall From The Sky (2016-) I am exploring time and indexicality (the physical relationship between the object photographed and its resulting image). The works in this series depict celestial objects such as stars, moons and planets. I use light from the Sun in the exposure of cyanotype photograms and silver gelatin photographs. Many of the images are made without a camera, using my drawings and sunlight to cast shadows on light-sensitive paper, so that the photograph records a trace—or index—of its subject. I chose astronomy for this project because photography and astronomy share the same relationship to time: as with looking at photographs, we look into the past when we look at the night sky.

In a recent body of work, New Shapes (2017), I constructed an unreal world that existed only to be photographed. I sculpted objects from polished sheet metal which I then assembled in temporary arrangements with mirrors and coloured lighting. I photographed these arrangements, then dismantled the assemblages and exhibited the photographs. By pursuing this laborious way of making photographs, I aimed to rebuild photography as a physical medium.

2019