Self Portraits and Body Acceptance
I have never had an easy relationship with my body. I was virtually unaware of it when I was young. I was an active child, brought up in the age when TV was the only screen we had and we watched an hour after school and a movie on the weekends. The rest of my […]
Keeping a Visual Diary
Finding inspiration and maintaining a flow of ideas and creativity is one of the hardest parts of being an artist. I know I, and many other artists, feel like inspiration should be easier to capture – after all we are creative beings, seeing and interpreting the world through whatever creative medium we choose. We see […]
Shooting Black and White Self-Portraits
I’ve always been drawn to black and white photography. There’s something that’s both simple and striking about a monochrome image, especially a portrait, where the absence of colour strips away a layer and allows light and emotion to take centre stage. That said, my own experiments with black and white photography have previously been less […]
The Cycles of Creativity
My creativity comes in ebbs and flows. I used to think that I was failing as an artist if I wasn’t consistently producing work. As soon as I had finished an image or called a series of photos complete I was looking for the next idea and this often left me frustrated and unable to […]
Behind the Scenes: Marionette
I wanted to portray a space with no defined boundaries – no indication of where it starts and ends, how big or small it is or what it’s made of. I wanted to explore how we react in that space, not knowing what our parameters are, standing and falling and rising again. I wanted to […]
Creating a Conceptual Self-Portrait
Conceptual photography, at its core, is about communicating a message, an idea, a theme or a story. To convey a concept in a single frame, the artist has to consider every step from planning to shooting and editing, so that each element in the image is purposeful and cohesive. To illustrate this point, I wanted […]
The Therapy of Creating a Body of Work
Creating a body of work – a series of pieces that cohesively go together to form a bigger story is a very different practice to creating single images. See, a body of work is usually created over time and time means an idea has space to grow, to develop and evolve. In my experience the […]
Vulnerability in Art
I have an inner art critic. Most artists do I suspect, given that creativity often requires us to dig into the deeper, scarier parts of ourselves and bring them to light, a task that is daunting at the best of times. Add to that the perceived judgement of others on our skills, ideas and technical […]