Atmosphere you can hold onto
Light you can lean against
Senses overcome

Another world
Where you can dream you belong

Clutter or calm
Grounded again
Body is lost
Start over

Walking a forever staircase
Happiness sits far away

Forwards to the other side?
A bit like my mind

Lately
Everything is flat
No textures to touch
Tastes are bland
Breaths are disappointing
Colours or none
Instead of scratches and prickles
I want things to stab
And shatter

Click on the cover to view the book… and click your way through the pages.

The little book tool is pretty simple and if for any reason you can’t view it, let me know. It isn’t suitable for small screens at the moment, but any smaller and it would not be readable anyway. It’s difficult to effectively show a book online.

The physical version is 12 x 12 inches, hard cover and 52 pages.

Often when I’m lying down hoping to get to sleep, it occurs to me I’m not breathing in much air. My nose doesn’t seem to be allowing in enough oxygen.

I try to take in deeper breaths but I need to exhale before I’ve finished inhaling. I begin to panic. I have to sit up and try to relax. This can only happen when I stop thinking about it.

Eventually I calm and lay back down, hoping it doesn’t happen again. But hoping means I’m thinking about it.

Sometimes this exhaustive cycle is what eventually gets me to sleep.

I was having a discussion with a friend about childhood and the time in our lives which shapes us the most. We talked about our grandparents’ failing memories; How they seem to lose most of them but those from a certain point in childhood remain vivid.

In my childhood photos I can hardly recognise myself. I got used to the images of me as a child smiling. But around the forced expressions I see a little boy I didn’t used to think was really me. As time goes by I’m beginning to feel that maybe these images are the only ones I’m really in. Though it’s difficult to know as by the time I sort through these thoughts and put them into words, I forget why I’m doing it.

I always get an urge to stop the car when I see roadkill. Sometimes to move the animal to save it from endless tyres. But often I don’t really know why.

Society today seems to shield us from being face to face with death, yet we’re exposed to so much more from a distance.

When I walk back from my car towards the animal, I don’t feel sad. Sometimes there is a fear that I’ll see something hard to look at, but generally I just curiously want to sit beside reality.

I don’t worry about small things. The superficiality of everyday modern living becomes insignificant. Something usually ignored seems more important. It holds more purpose than our petty concerns.

To society common, I’m seen as strange for prefering this to going home to watch CSI on television. But the more I think about it, the other way around just seems strange. I suppose the difference is that I am thinking, whereas the alternative is an exercise in preventing thought.

In order for life to continue, life must be consumed. At the top of the food chain, our closet of skeletons is the biggest of all. The progression of mankind is the result of a history of violence. Our intelligence is thanks to murder.

It’s hard for many to accept that a mosquito has no higher purpose. That the viruses it spreads do not exist for a reason which is somehow beneficial to us in the long run.

A female mosquito requires blood in order to breed and one of its favourite sources is humans. The method in which the mosquito extracts blood can allow the transfer of viruses.

It’s been 18 months since I was bitten and I can still barely walk most days. Yet each day I seem to become more frustrated with people (in all our wisdom) than I do with mosquitos.

My only motivation to write is to interrupt the pure, blankness of the page. It’s a struggle to bring myself to the task. A task… That must be why I fight it.

During those several weeks I never saw it as a task. To pick up a pen and paper was a relief. It was a way to catch the overflow; a way to stop the drain.

Sometimes I try to draw comparisons with the ringing noises. Crickets? Cicadas? Screams? It’s not an easy thing to do. Rehearsing in my head… for my head… using memories from my head… while my head screams at me. It feels like I need to reach beyond consciousness. But it’s hard to focus. And it’s hard to think about focusing.

Until… reboot. I can’t remember what I was thinking. I can’t think of what I’m trying to remember. Yet I can see it falling away. But it’s dark. Well it’s not even physical. There is nothing to see. Though I keep trying, and every grasp to hang on further shakes the foundations. Sometimes the tremor plateaus. Sometimes the plateau breaks apart.

I don’t have many vivid memories of my grandfather. I sometimes wonder if I had photographed him, would it feel different to look at the pictures? Would I feel more connected?

Even seeing myself in images as a child, I don’t feel a sense of familiarity. So it seems like a struggle to feel familiar with my ancestors in old photographs.

Prior to the invention of photography, was there a deeper sense of struggle for remembrance? Hearing stories, maybe even seeing and touching belongings or creations, must surely not have yielded such strong feelings of connectedness. Or perhaps the need to make significant use of one’s imagination might have resulted in a greater sense of fulfilment.

Perhaps the more clues to knowing a person, through the viewing of a photograph, the more questions that arise.

I used to imagine what it would be like being one of those kids at school who had shifted house six times, changed schools, swapped friends and started over. I never thought my family would move as they enjoyed the comfort of familiarity and stability.

When we moved to a new house I was 16 so it was not really like those kids I had observed. But looking back I notice changes in feeling. Houses became more modern. Everything became clean, bright and white. My new home felt more open and less like a cocoon of safety.

I see more of my childhood home in my mother’s childhood home. I never lived there but it still has that feeling which reminds me…well not of anything specifically. There’s just an overwhelming sense of feeling reminded.

The wallpaper is discoloured, becoming brown in parts. Even where some has broken away revealing a whiter wall, it still feels homely. The patterns on the wallpaper seem to be of endless variety. Tiling, lining, skirting… There appears almost endless details.

There is no such thing as perfection. No matter how much one strives for it, the goal can never be reached.

Many take their fulfilment from the pursuit. Many are happy with near enough. Many are never fulfilled. Never being content with the first, I have always found myself alternating between the two latter options.

Over the previous few years I have discovered another solution. Allowing oneself to be open to opportunity, to give time to the unconscious and to embrace the random.

In producing artwork I have found the harder I try the less the results feel like an honest part of me.

Sometimes it has taken the serendipitous to make me realise this. Mistakes and accidents can open a window to new worlds where we can learn so much more about ourselves and discover new experiences.

Before the days of the handheld consumer camera there was a bit of a fad in buying these little viewing boxes with a lens and mirror where you could basically walk around holding it out to see the image on a little 2D plane. It sounds counter-intuative to us but we couldn’t understand, as today cameras are part of every day society. I often choose to shoot square medium format with a waist level viewfinder and I have realised the similarities with this old toy.

• Medium Format because it is big, but not big enough to make it difficult to carry around easily.
• Square because my creative decision-making isn”t influenced by a rectangle with a bias given a particular orientation. I always feel I am trying to fit as much of a scene within the constraints of a rectangle, but with the square I’m more relaxed and my unconscious mind seems to work with my emotions to determine the composition.
• A Waist Level Viewfinder because photographic art to me is about seeing in another dimension. Just standing on my head is enough to please the part of me always wanting something new. So being able to preview the resulting film to scale in the palm of my hand allows me to look ahead and stop when the visual clicks with my feelings and the feelings I wish to convey.

“Patients” began from looking into photographic history and in particular post-mortem photographs. It’s a journey through the modern art timeline and an analysis of the portraiture canon.

The portrait is traditionally an interaction between the viewer and the eyes of the actor. The direction of the actor’s gaze allows the actor to determine where the viewer is to look.

The post-mortem photograph seems to defy portraiture in that the actor is not alive to interact with the viewer. Of course this is a contradiction in itself as the life imaged in the photograph is lost at the moment of capture. It would seem, however, that we generally place some importance on whether the actor was alive or dead at the prior moment.

Therefore, what if the actor is alive but their eyes are closed? Does one assume rest or death? Does one attempt to interact with the shut eyes or does one become the voyeur and take advantage of viewing without being matched with a gaze.

What if the viewer does not know if the subject is alive? Does the viewer have the evidence to conclude they are alive? What separates such a photograph from a post mortem photograph captured in the 19th century?

As the author of the series at its conclusion, I rarely look upon the images and see the people without life. I think about death when I see them, but I think about death anyway and this could simply be my mindset. Would I react differently to the images if I had not created the works and didn’t know the people?

I think about the portrait as a genre, as an artform, as a memory. I think about who and I think about why. If I can make others think, then I have achieved what I strive for.