My photography explores two ideas: that human identity is enduringly shaped by, and expressed through, the things we construct – and that solitude, our capacity for reflection and withdrawal, has an enduring influence on our experience of life.  In my series, images capture people lost in the dream state, under the influence of the unconscious mind – a form of solitude that evolution should never have favored, working as it does against the tribal bonds that have kept our species alive.  Yet there was a point in evolution where we moved away from this herd culture, and at the same moment gave a new dimension to the landscape around us.

In my work, such as the Dreamscapes series, I trace these two evolutions together: the changing landscape and the growing human capacity for interiority.  This series moves from herds of animals photographed in groups – protective, supportive – to the isolated human figure, the dreamer.  It follows the reshaping of our collective identity by solitude and reflection, the clearing of space for the unconscious to emerge.  As the landscape evolved, it paralleled this psychological turn inward.  The desire to curate, collect, archive, tame emerged.  The things we built began to hold something of the people who made them – the architects – and then outlived them by generations, their material decaying on a far wider scale of time. 

In each of my other series, the same act of the dreamer in “Dreamscapes” is asked of the viewer – to complete a form below the waterline, to resolve a scene of unrelated, superimposed objects, to reassemble time in Passing.  In Emersion, the brain is forced to complete a form that we’re only shown fragments of, where the image is hidden under the waterline.  In Doubles, a layer of glass rearranges the image into a collage of objects that the mind resolves into a single coherent scene.  In Passing, three separate walks – different coastlines, different seasons, different film stock – have a sense of motion and continuity that isn’t actually there – as a series stitched together purely by the repetition of a solitary walking figure.  The ultimate statement is how we continue to dream and live under the spell of the unconscious.