The Tin-can Firmament

Tin-can Firmament, is a series of months-long exposure pinhole photographs of the sky presented - in an appropriation of the language of a classic photographic expedition - as a series of semi-fictional astronomical observations. The environment plays a large hand in the creation of the photographs as the pinhole camera tins fill with water and rust, lifting the emulsion in places, causing the pock-marks, swirls and strange refractions of light in the final works that are redolent of, and come to represent the celestial bodies. The result is the creation of a semi-fiction that is grounded in a reality that plays somewhat on the repetition of certain patterns within nature – think microbial organisms, the petri dish, the retinal photo, the circulatory system, water courses, tree branches, weather systems, supernovas, wormholes and galaxies. Beyond the placement of the camera the agency of the photographer is bypassed by an effectively objective elemental record. The photographs do not depict events, rather the conditions of light and time in which events took place.