Artist’s Statement
My recent photographic work explores ways to use the beauty that is inherent in nature and to transform the images captured, using a process of visual evolution to create a new subjective meaning. This is done through the digital photographic process by capturing images that are not seen within the context of the place where they have existed. This exclusion of the context is achieved by such techniques as macro photography, the movement of the camera during exposure, or by natural transformation such as a reflected image on water distorted by surface movement and photographed in isolation. The source material is driven initially by an objective response to abstract qualities such as line, tone, colour, shape and texture, and how visually exciting the image is, whether it be passive, active, or somewhere between the two
All my images are taken in RAW format and processed in a computer using Adobe Photoshop. Once the pictures are in the computer the process of transformation is undertaken without objective reference to their origins and initially progress using purely aesthetic decisions. The visual transformation proceeds as a result of the adjustment to the colour intensity, colour balance, image brightness and image contrast on all pictures, and in some cases formal adjustments are made using the cloning tool in local areas within an image. As the work progresses a new visual interpretation is suggested but its evolution is never taken to a conclusion, rather it is at a point where echoes of its origin are still evident and elements of a new interpretation are becoming defined. It is intended that this state of flux can create an opening through which the viewer may pass and become emotionally involved, by recalling their own past experience of nature, which has been triggered by remnants of the images origin, and by sensing a change in progress.
The titles look to the future of the images evolution and suggest a direction that has been revealed to me. These titles are never specific, allowing the viewer to either follow the suggested direction or to pursue their own interpretation. The titles are suggested by concepts of physical, subjective and philosophical creation, such as the birth and evolution of worlds, a micro ecosystem on the trunk of a tree or the very process of artistic creation itself. Some titles may also allude to mythological or allegorical ideas such as the ‘Birth of Fire’, and ‘Mystical Garden’, The titles also draw on events that can illicit strong emotional feeling, such as the passage of sunlight across a tree trunk that acquire the qualities of landscape, the changing of dark into light suggesting dawn, a state of being or a place that might remind us of a past memory.