My practice is fundamentally threaded with the sense of family, domesticity and the nuances of change woven in the mundane of humanity, marking the passage of time, and highlighting transitions we all face in our human walk of life. My main inquisitions centre around a sense of home and place, including exploring feelings of homelessness, not in a physical sense but the feelings of homelessness within one's own home, isolation, invisibility and redundancy often associated with ageing. Ageing can often challenge our sense of identity as we navigate its elusive landscape. It also reveals a fragile awareness of time as we inevitably pass the baton of youth to those coming behind. With it comes a stillness we hadn't previously known, treasuring our existence, unveiled as we begin to caress the preciousness of time.
Life Lines is a photographic expression documenting the intricacies of life, weaving a subjective narrative revealing joy and pain as living side by side. Stirring a curious awareness of the 'in-between moments' where life ultimately lives—exploring ideas of ageing, loss, identity, marriage, home and family generations while using an intuitive and instinctive approach, often creating narratives infused with melancholy and feelings of restlessness and loss. My intention is to reveal the underbelly of love which is the bedrock of my practice. Love is painful, beautiful and shocking, and may it be the last act that shocks the world.
As a Snowbird my Dad never stayed down in Florida in the summer, hence missing the hurricane season. This was the closest he got to one. Thankfully it turned in the night and missed south Florida all together.
Washing his car in between rain showers. His rational, the rain will rinse it.
Although I have photographed my family for years, I did not start Faces of a Family in a focused way until January 2017. It is an ongoing project: a mixture of documentary, semi-formal and environmental portraits. The majority of the pictures are taken spontaneously; my camera has been a continual presence over the years, is trusted as another member of the family and gives me privileged access which strongly influenced my photography. I want to create a record of ordinary, unvarnished, unscripted family life, the quirks and idiosyncrasies that makes every family unique. Faces of a Family focuses on my family on both sides of the Atlantic, it records us as individuals and as a group, finding beauty and lyricism in the mundane.
Olivia, the youngest of three. She entered this world feet first with her head firmly planted under her mother’s ribs. The doctor tried to turn her in the womb but she decided her entrance into the world.
She is now 16. She’s strong, determined, decisive, full of love and destine for success.
Emergent @olivia16 is an on going exploration of Olivia as she navigates her way through the often times, ensnaring entrapments that beckon any teenager yet, this beautiful young woman is emerging through the cocoon of adolescence.
She is emergent, ‘the process of coming into being or becoming prominent.’ She is Olivia at 16.
Somewhere in the Middle is a project about home, local community and seeing the beauty in the diversity that makes up humanity.
Exploring life in the middle.
The Great Collide is an investigation using multiple exposures on 35mm film. I sit suspended between two nations, American by birth and Scottish by marriage. Although my primary residence is Scotland I find I have spent many years looking back at my American heritage. Two nation collide within me and I find myself no longer fully American nor am I fully Scottish, I am somewhere in the middle. My current creative interpretation of this collide is expressed through exposing a roll of 35mm colour film in one country and wind it back on the camera and re expose the roll in the other country, mimicking the juxtaposition of nations living intertwined within me. There is no photoshop used, the images are created all in camera.
Mr & Mrs was first created in Detroit Michigan in 1986 with my Nikon F3 35mm camera using tri x 400 film. This was part of a creative series whilst attending art school at Center for Creative Studies College of Art and Design (CCS) which is known today as College for Creative Studies in Detroit.