Galleries
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15 imagesMemories do not have edges. When I recall a journey, I find my recollections fixate only on small visual fragments of the trip. And my mind stitches these fragments; it blends them despite the missing parts. I have built a camera that tries to replicate this experience. I have done away with the discrete photographic frame. Vistas spill to the outer edges of the film as well as becoming serendipitously entangled with others along the strip. The strip is not a decisive moment, it represents the journey, the flow, like a drifting memory recalling the essence of a place.
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3 imagesArtists were given the opportunity to select and repurpose a decommissioned library book. The books originated from the campus Library at Ara Institute of Canterbury. I was drawn to the "Employment reports of New Zealand 1998", a record of disputes between Employees and Employers. The common theme throughout the book was the different perspectives seen by the people involved in each legal case. I converted the book into a two-chamber pinhole camera, with each chamber facing a different direction. I used the book-camera to photograph places or objects of public debate.
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11 imagesWater is a pivotal force within nature that sculpts and nourishes the New Zealand environment. Water has helped to define our country. The lakes and rivers are the life-giving veins flowing across the land and out to sea. The sun drives the continuous water cycle, evaporating the sea to feed the mountains again with the rain that carves the rocks. For this series I have designed a unique pinhole camera that collects precipitation into the image-forming chamber. A camera that records light, time, and water. Inside the camera, the water alters the photographic interpretation of the vista it helped to create. Its mark-making qualities sculpts my paper negative slowly over the long exposure. Wearing the surface and etching tide lines, leaving another trace of its journey.
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7 imagesI am not looking for the deceive moment; I am interesting how many moments collate to tell a story. These works explore the concept of still life that is in motion. By studying objects visually as they journey through time, you see their transition through different states of being. Out of the fog of time, I find new forms of beauty, which is not connected to the ideals of the pristine. Flowers wilt, candles melt, apples rot, and wine evaporates; everything degrades. When stepping back and witnessing these events as a whole, from outside of the present, I see the beauty in how the end completes the beginning. The photographs have been created using one single long exposure, ranging from a whole day, to eight weeks in duration. They have been captured on large format 4x5 film cameras using a fogging technique, and this, in itself is a celebration of the aging process.
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19 imagesThese works are from a variety of exhibitions over a five-year period. The exhibitions explored forgotten human elements that often appear out of place within the natural environment. The photographs were taken during the quite small hours of the night, where the only thing moving in the darkness was the moon. By working with low sensitivity colour film, very long exposures durations could be achieved, which visually capturing the passage of time. With the camera slowly watching for up to an hour long at a time, my movement through the scenes becomes that of a ghost. The only evidence of my fleeting presence is the painting with light, which makes the objects appear to be strangely self-illuminated. Out of the darkness a new apparition of the world appears. There is a peculiar sense of stillness, and into this the elements appear unfamiliar, sometimes mysterious, sometimes foreboding.
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9 imagesWhen will we all be forgotten? Light travels relentlessly at 299 792 458 metres per second through the vacuum of open space. Back on earth, when you sit in the darkness and gaze up at the stars that form the dense centre of the milky way, you are looking at light that has been journeying for around 25,000 light-years. These ancient photons have journeyed a long time to enter your eye, where they are absorbed by your rods and cones. Light from the far edges of our galaxy has been travelling longer, 100,000 light years. These time scales make the duration of human civilization just a small flash in the darkness. I am drawn to man-made objects that are seemingly isolated within a sparce landscape. At night the context of these objects feels remote. I find them objects of curiosity and wonder how long before they become mysterious antiquities? And then how will our follies be perceived?
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1 imageDiffer your perception and the sun slowly passing through the sky becomes the tip of a pen scribing a blinding line. A line so intense that it burns its presence into the image, charring away the surface of the medium to embed itself deeper within. This indelible heavenly ink is mysterious, be it a particle or a wave, its junction with our world often goes unnoticed.
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9 imagesWithin still looking I have focused on elements and scenes that I have found majestic and inspired in me a sense of awe. Reflections of the spiritual found in the physical world. At night, these spaces have a quiet sense of timelessness, which is heightened when photographed with the absence of people. The exhibition title still looking also references the time intensive process involved to create an image within the hours of darkness. The camera is locked in position, as each exposure slowly accumulates not only light but also records the passage of time. The visual effect of this echoes the sense of timelessness and lifts the hidden scenes from a sea of darkness.
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12 imagesFor the exhibition Unknowable, I have produced a series of pinhole works that reveal unseeable designs created by nature and unpredictable patterns introduced by chance. Within drawing, a line can be thought of as a mark made by a moving point or dot. In these pinhole photographs, the Sun is my point and the Earths constant rotation provides the apparent movement of my point. To capture the movement, I use a very long exposure to reveal the suns daily traverse as a line across the sky in the finished image. Making these marks using sunlight as my pen connects with the Greek origins for the word photography, which translates as ‘drawing with light’. When the pinhole camera is left in a static position for many months. The gradual shift in the suns altitude corresponding to the change of seasons can be seen as an expanding series of graceful arcs in sky. If passing clouds obscure the sun; gaps or breaks appear in the lines, resulting in the emergence of what looks like an unreadable form of cosmic Morse code. With exposure times ranging from several months up to a year and a half, the cameras have to be left unattended in situ. This leaves opportunity for unpredictable events to contribute to the end result. If the camera’s position alters, the sun will start to draw lines out of kilter with the initial pattern. The new series of lines may cross over, merge, or completely separate from the original set. This can be seen in some of my images where the Canterbury earthquakes have left their own marks. Often surprising images are generated from unplanned human intervention. Over the many years that this project has been running, many of the cameras have been repeatedly moved, thrown, and even smashed. The resulting erratic sun trails go some way to tell the story of the camera’s experience. But all too often the cameras are taken away and simply disappear, leaving their story untold.