THE WORK

My creative practice is a combination of abstract conceptualisation, technical development, and improvisation.

My philosophy of art is deeply rooted in first-generation abstract expressionism of the New York School and its surrealist antecedents. The creative endeavour is equal parts self-examination and individuation.

I employ a range of techniques and compositional structures to facilitate continual shifts in awareness when viewing my pictures. One's attention is continually drawn through the depth of the image and redirected between global and local information processing. This is similar to the experience of immersion in polyphonic music or soundscapes. The pictures owe as much to Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane as to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.

The pictures are subject to various sources of signal degradation that echo the effects of visual snow syndrome and the resulting perceptual uncertainty.

Further exploration of individual series can be found below and on their respective gallery pages.

STUDIO

This series is a convergence of internal and external worlds: the synthetic content of the mind, the noise of the brain, and perception of experience commingling into a single, non-unified reality.

It is fundamentally surrealist in this sense.

Each picture is the product of multiple individual compositions made with pigment and binder on recycled paper, usually applied with scraps of canvas.

The fields and marks are interpretations of the spontaneously generated imagery that my brain continually produces, as well as the palinopsia that accompanies my visual static. Compositions are inherently intuitive and marked by a subconscious deployment of rhythm where repeated form and line function as afterimages within the layers and call-and-response between them.

The various compositions serve as an analogues of printing plates (practically) or subjects of awareness (symbolically). These compositions are combined in camera through multiple exposures on a single frame of photographic film.

The photographic medium allows the compositions to exist at independent distances (or on multiple planes) within a confined interior space and echoes the dual nature of the mind as both camera and projector.

STREET

This series has its conceptual origins in synthetic cubism.
Multiple exposures are employed to collect found materials and arrange them into a single composition incorporating multiple angles of perception or sources of information.
The imagery contained within a single frame is often located at a distance, and the artist is required to hold an internal visualisation of the forming image throughout its construction.

The process is akin to gestural painting: an instantaneous act of creation, simulataneously constructive and destructive, followed by a period of reflection and visualisation. I conceptualise this as an analogue of the mind's process of meaning-making, where disparate elements are collected and combined, sometimes with no suggestion of their independent origins.

The results are sometimes beautiful, yet they are often turbid, confused or impenetrable. These I keep for myself as symbols of the personal and incommunicable.

The conceptual importance of expanded cognitive awareness is superseded by the urgency of removing photography's burden of representation that it inherited from painting. Perspective, shadow and depth-of-field are negated within each exposure to emphasise the flatness of the film plane itself. It is not the camera's ability to depict the objects of the physical world that is important but its unrealised capacity to reconstruct internal states.

Freedom of expression is prioritised over liberation of thought.