a: I’d love to know how this whole world started for you, and if you always felt like image-making could be your thing.
The world started for me very early on, Creating pockets of visual fantasy was born of necessety, my earliest and longest lasting memories of childhood are of the world I’d created to overlap the world I existed in.
For as many blank walls, empty shelves, unanswered questions and hours of the day to pass there was opportunity to build a world for me to explore, places with out earthly boundaries, forms or sense. I heard the call to adventure in my earliest moments, I didn’t yet have the freedom to answer but I made sure to spend every moment imagining how the world might be when I finally did. Being an only child had the biggest impact on me creatively, being without mirrors in the form of other children is a very interesting & limitless path to adult hood.
Without siblings or many other people around you there is no one to tell you who you are or what the world is so you just create yourself, you create your world, you have to opportunity to grow in an open field, it was really the biggest gift bestowed to me.
Everything to me was like a blank canvas, everything including myself was malleable so I built, I moulded, I created, I imagined, I asked big questions & I followed my curiosity about who I was so naturally I was a very visually creative child.
My mum had a Polaroid camera that I would use since the age of about 5, this is the first time that I understood that I could express my imagination and ultimately myself through a medium and from that medium I could better understand myself, I felt that I could see myself in the visual decisions I’d made, in the subject, in the light, the flame was lit.
I picked up a camera again in college doing my art A-level, all of my art work was lost, my teacher suggested I quickly go to the park and take some photos so I would have work to submit so I could pass, the air was crisp with winter, the trees, the grass, the air was covered in a crystal frost and as I began taking photos I just remember the power of this interaction with nature, life and myself all at once. The camera was a vehicle for me to see in a way I had never before and ever since I’ve adored the intimacy & freedom of the medium.
a: I feel like there’s always something a bit intimidating, or a touch of darkness, surrounding some of your concepts. Where does that come from, or am I wrong?
I love this question, my work is always synthesised with me and my personal truth’s bleed into my work in one way or another. For as much light within me there is a darkness… I’m know my darkness very well, finding great value and necessity in harnessing it, the dichotomy of knowing the self deeply is to be burnt both by the light of sun and the reflection of the moon and I think that personal truth is perhaps intimidating where it shows up.
I think art should be confrontational without positive or negative connotations, whether the work peaks your interest of not the answer is always informative of a personal truth, bringing you closer to yourself. In short the darkness & intimidation comes from me creating honest work.
a: Can you tell me about the fantasies you like to build inside your images?
Whilst I’m conceptualising a project I always know that I have no idea what the end result will be, the process is the magic for me so I leave that open to be re-informed so the fantasies mostly create themselves. The image is the foundation and its not really until I begin editing that the experimentation begins, the fantasy injects itself based on the boundaries I can visually see whilst also keeping a thread of my creative intention anchored to the kite.
The way I like to include the element of fantasy is to insert a sense of otherness into it, a sense that something is present, or missing, or not real, or impossible layered over the image that is real, with real people and real locations etc. Mirroring my first sentence now that I come to think of it. To make an an absract answer simple, the fantasy I like to build in my world is to create visual tools that aid the questioning of reality rather than fantasy itself.
a: I’m really drawn to the way you use light, because it feels very cinematic to me. Does that inspiration come from cinema in any way? I’d love to know more about your references.
That’s very kind, thank you. Cinema is my great love, my imagination & memory work to me like a cinematic play back, from conception of an idea my vision for a project is as sensory and whole as a film, film is 100% one of my ultimate reference points.
Other reference spaces include paintings, sculpture, mythology and nature, the majesty of the natural world has always captivated me, the endless dicotomies of force & stillness, sanctity & terror, home & abandon are a sea of endless contrasts I love to drown in. To create spaces in my work that are made up from such thought voyages of these contrasts is my secret ingredient I think.
I have a never ending love for the theatre of life, life to me is series of never ending scenes so naturally I take so much inspiration from cinematic stills.
I’m completely obsessed with image theory and how the use of light, negative / positive space, angles, shapes etc combine to communicate and illicit and endless combination of responses in an observer. I’m also deeply inspired by religious, especially catholic imagery, the dogmatic elements used to illicit both power and sanctity over the people who believe in the image itself is incredibly rich in theoretical value.
I only really reference my memory, I trust that anything I remember has imprinted because it has spoken deeply to me, so my pool of reference is pretty much just my mind, I couldn’t name many bodies of work or artists but when I’m working on a project is usually always have a different film I’m pulling from. At the moment it’s ‘The imaginarium of Dr Parnassus’ for my project ‘Imaginarium’ about a really impactful dream I had in February.
All images courtesy of @t.a.snee.m
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