An archive, not a shopfront
Trained properly at Central School of Art in the 1970s, and never quite recovered.
Forty-odd years of commissioned design for industry and museums sits alongside the rest of it — landscape photography and iPhone histamatics taken for no client and no brief, kept because they were worth keeping.
Photography
35mm platesMuch of this photography seeks out the visual miscellany and discarded artefacts most people choose to overlook, walk past, or simply step over — usually because they’re in a hurry to get somewhere more photogenic. The images typically comprise a combination of colour, texture and shape, steeped in the passage of time and liberally dusted with ephemeral light, a process no conservator would thank me for encouraging. This mellow ‘ageing’ gifts the compositions with a life and character of their own, resonating still with the lives of the people who created, used, neglected and abandoned them — a visual testament to transience, life’s frailties, and the average person’s reluctance to throw anything away properly.
Histamatics
from Instagram, unrepentantly squarePhone photos, filtered, cropped square and posted without much shame. Less considered than the plates above, and no worse for it.
Edition prints
studio work, printed and soldThe other end of the spectrum from the histamatics above — lit, composed, and considered, rather than grabbed in passing.
Design work
brochures & exhibition design, selectedThe bit that paid for the cameras. Four decades of briefs, deadlines and other people’s opinions — a surprising number of which turned out rather well. Some of it has since been redesigned by other hands, which is, apparently, what happens to good work eventually.
