Artist Statement

As young children growing up in small-town New Zealand, my brother, a friend and I used to play in a large abandoned building. The different rooms were in varying states of disrepair, often containing objects that appealed to us. We gathered these trinkets and put them together into the cleanest of the rooms, essentially creating a hideout.

Whilst the specific histories of places that I visited for this body of work are, conceptually speaking, irrelevant, there is an inherent sympathy for that which is stagnant, abandoned or neutered by various external forces.

In contrast to urban exploration, which is often adrenaline-fuelled, my work is a formalised process that is much more about absorbing, reading and activating spaces that have somehow been disconnected from general society.

Typically I deliberately enter spaces blind, only with a vague idea of what I am about to encounter. Any ambiguity in the resultant images should enable a new, personalised reading by someone who then views the work. Essentially replicating my original experience.

That said, with one of the venues shot in early 2009, scale essentially forced me to seek out some detail prior to the visits.

I was also privileged to engage with a person who had a direct, highly emotional connection to the space. I found this a profoundly moving experience, particularly later when making the images, as it contextualised and humanised seemingly inert buildings.

As with many Australasian artists, themes in my work have often been identity-based. I find myself without a set of pre-determined motifs from which I can draw and I instead tend to grasp for an emotive connection.

I have always found any study of genealogy/sociology to be a rather dry, essentially intellectual pursuit, so I have concentrated on becoming more aware of what moves me. The problem comes with ownership of any motifs that might affect me. What rights do I have in regards to their usage? If I have sympathy for something, is it wrong to acknowledge that creatively?

I want my images to be less about specifics (ie. a school, a church, etc.) and more about universal experience. That is, what moves both the viewer and I without it being so much about the content imaged. Because of this, the images are often intentionally highly ambiguous.

What or who is not there? What can’t we quite see? How do we overcome the helplessness of not being able to ground an image in a time line?

The images are an attempt to exploit this helplessness and the illusion of reality to create a more visceral, rather than intellectual, response to images.

Notes on the series:

The first exhibition of works from five happened from July 9-August 2, 2009 at the Perth Centre for Photography.

Two images from the series were shown at the 2009 Bunbury Biennale and five #08 was selected as a finalist in both the 2009 Fremantle Print Award and the 2010 National Photography Prize.

The second exhibition of works from five happened from October 30-November 28, 2010 at the Queensland Centre for Photography.

five #12. Lightjet Print in an Edition of 5.
100cm x 80cm (2008)

five #04. Lightjet Print in an Edition of 5.
100cm x 80cm (2009)