Your Family

Once upon a time...........................................................................................................



The End.

Your Family will be being shown at the Stranraer Museum, Dumfries, Scotland until the 31st of October 2009, in conjunction with 'Place, Identity, Memory and the Artists Book from Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries.
Your Family is a body of work looking at placing old anonymous found images alongside my own contemporary ones in hope of dialogue, that the images themselves hold their own conversations, one elucidating the other. I often wonder what the conversations are when the pages of the book are shut and the images are left in their own company.

Going back to the start

Going back to the start is a hand made book consisting of 51 images of seascapes and dwellings, images made in Sulawesi; Indonesia. It opens in three sections allowing you to move backwards and forwards like a wave or indeed as the breath we breathe.

Art for Grabs

Art for Grabs is back once more, and I am happy that I will be there again, this time to launch my new book 'Going back to the start.' It has been a daunting task with only just over one month to put the book together after the shooting stage, my studio floor is covered in snippets and paper and is looking like it will remain that way right up until the 26th! For this book the images were made over 36 days in Sulawesi, and is a deeper insight into the island, but used metaphorically to question our delicate world, it is an ebb and flow as in a wave but also like the breath we breathe. I'm sure it will be a great weekend and hoping to see lots of old faces and meets lots of new ones.

The Artist and the Archive

A true photographer is a humble one. Their ego dissolved into the image. Their life force lives in the photograph so that the photograph can live. Maybe some of our greatest photographers have been anonymous. Is it the case that maybe the less there is of the artist, the greater the art?
Just as we live in photography, it lives in us; maybe it is the case that photography finds us and not the other way around. For those who use it to enhance themselves, for applause and their own fame and glory, could leave it at any time.
For those who photography finds, must give him or herself to it, merge with it, then it is the photograph that becomes truly great. For these people they can never leave photography, they may want to sometimes but it is impossible. It is as much a part of them as the blood flowing in their veins. Something to be shared and something to grow like a beautiful sunflower reaching for the sun.

The two images above are from my collection of found images, the photographers are not known.

Ocean of Tears.

In her pain she went from day to day
the blood ink red on paper she penned
As she crossed an ocean of tears
thoughts of what might have been.
Like a distant Diva, on a lotus leaf,
In the blood red dusk the flames sank low
until they finally disappeared.

She shed no breath, no tears, no sigh,
as the crescent moon
rose into the sky.

For Michael

Volcano, Volcano, Volcano, this one's for you Michael.