appropriately fleeting… tales from a modern inferno.

Talking about Rodin's "Gates of Hell" sculpture, Albert Elson said in his book on the artist that "mankind was adrift in an empire of night, separated from, rather than being victim of, it's deity, born with a fatal duality of desire and an incompatibility to fulfil it, damned on both sides of the tomb to an internal hell of passions."

These dystopian images are a form of found Décollage that uses the symbolic forms of fly posters to reflect this duality of desire and unfulfillment in modern society. Photographing these provocative symbols is an act of cultural re writing where the structures of mass media culture have been re shuffled and re inhabited by a type of cultural iconoclasm that questions the authenticity of the objects of our desires and asks, are we damned to our own hell of passions?

dust in the air suspended

untitled 2002

Ash on an old man's sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

untitled 2002

Dust inbreathed was a house -

The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,

The death of hope and despair,

This is the death of air.

untitled 2002

There are flood and drouth

Over the eyes and in the mouth,

Dead water and dead sand

Contending for the upper hand.

untitled 2002

The parched eviscerate soil

Gapes at the vanity of toil,

Laughs without mirth.

This is the death of earth.

Words from Little Gidding (No. 4 of 'four quartets') by T.S. Elloitt

one week in my life...

This project comes from my personal experience of moving away from home and the feelings of isolation that this can bring. I was interested in the idea that the places in which we live can seem different depending on our perceptions and I used Photography to indicate the sense I had of being forced, involuntarily, through a series of emotional and physical changes. They indicate my reaction to the space where I found myself and the memories and associations that it both triggered and accentuated.

Winner of the 2002 D&AD Student Awards for The Most Outstanding Photography.

“The electric lights in the street cast a pale sheen here and there on the ceiling and the upper surfaces of the furniture, but down below, where he lay, it was dark…

In such moments he focused his eyes as sharply as possible on the window, but unfortunately, the prospect of the morning fog, which even muffled the other side of the narrow street, brought him little encouragement and comfort.”

Metamorphosis, Kafka – 1915. 

 

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

untitled 2002

contact