Relationscapes

Blurring Lines – Between What is and What isn’t

Whether it is fiction or non-fiction, I am an avid reader. It gives me an opportunity to engage with others and to think in relation to them. When I was looking at changing the way I worked with a camera, part of my process was to read essays on photography by Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, to stimulate my thinking about what makes a photo “art”. All the while I was taking photos, trying to sense which ones sustainably moved me and why.

I kept coming back to an equation of sorts: consonance + dissonance = resonance. That is, for a photo to resonate it has to juxtapose harmonious elements with a certain disruptive force that entices us to engage with the image. As I explored this concept, I found myself challenging and expanding my own familiar aesthetics and in the process developing the techniques used to create the artworks presented here.

Using a technique I call sampling, the images in Relationscapes are characterised by my love of surrealism. With their dreamlike qualities the images blur the lines between what is and what isn’t while opening up the question of what might be.