This series of paintings is based on photographs taken at night. The camera’s settings are not adjusted to the dark, so at first the image appears black. I then open it in editing software and increase its brightness, pulling forms from the shadow. Ian Burn’s Xerox Book (1968) — a series of recursive photocopies exposing the faults of machine reproduction — was an important influence for my work.
Some information in the photographs cannot be retrieved through editing: being shot in low light, it is lost in a mist of digital noise. In dealing with a personal loss in 2021, I became interested in the fragility and fraudulence of memory. The faults in the photographs undermine photography's veracity as a medium and brings it closer to memory.
Digital photograph
Disturbance No. 1 (2021), Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm; A Year's Turning (2021), Oil on board, 20 x 20cm
Disturbance No.2 (2021), Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm
