All Photographs are memento mori.....*

My art practice is centred on the photographic image and focuses on themes of memory, time and place. Inspired by author and critic Susan Sontag’s famous statement that ‘all photographs are memento mori…..’ much of my work involves an exploration of this assertion. Photography’s essential paradox – the permanent and fixed evidence of a transient moment – lies at the heart of my engagement with the medium. The power of the photograph to evoke a past memory, a person’s presence or a sense of place is my prime area of interest. I work with a mixture of analogue and digital processes, using my family archive, found photographs, vintage postcards and text as a source for ideas. These physical objects are combined with my own photographs to make collages creating a composite reality, a fusion of now and then, instigating a dialogue between the past and the present. My digital collage work featuring old postcards addresses a range of contemporary local, national and global issues.

I also work with historical photographic and printmaking processes and for the last few years have been experimenting with salt prints, cyanotypes, anthotypes and platinum palladium printing in the fields of portraiture, landscape and botanical studies. Much of my work is on a small, intimate scale, often displayed in handmade book form.

I am a member of London Independent Photography and of the Newlyn Society of Artists. I now live and photograph in the far west of Cornwall

*Susan Sontag On Photography