How do you describe your own art practice?
My work incorporates photography, painting, model-making and digital manipulation. I use a combination of techniques to create complex photomontages. My working procedure resembles the construction of film sets. I create environments that might at first appear real but on closer inspection begin to fall apart. There are paradoxes of light, scale perspective and movement which both involve the viewer in the construction of the image and make them question it. There is a double ambiguity in my most recent work between inside and outside and between painting and photography.
What was your first experience with art?
I was fascinated by insects when I was a child and used to make very detailed drawings of specimens I’d found in the garden. I followed the example of illustrations I’d collect from books of Victorian natural history. The clarity of representation impressed me greatly, and the way in which a whole life cycle could be shown on a single page. I also had a book of Victorian photography and a book of reproductions of paintings by Magritte – which I stole from the school library at the age of eleven and still have today.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Mistakes and accidents. They often make me see it in a different way.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Time, inspiration and self-discipline.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m going through photographs I’ve taken on recent trips to abandoned places, which I’m using as material for new work. Over the last couple of months, I’ve visited Mussolini’s abandoned villa in Rhodes, ruined Haciendas in Mexico and two semi-ruined Elizabethan mansions in Northamptonshire.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
I loved the Alexander Calder show at the Tate Modern earlier this year. I hadn’t seen much of his work before and didn’t expect to find it quite so beautiful – or, I suppose, to take much away from it. It made me think about arrested movement in my own work.
