My work is based around an obsessive preoccupation with home and until recently, consisted predominantly of photographs taken in interior spaces with mere suggestions of outside space. When I stepped outside with my camera, I felt overwhelmed by the absence of limitations provided so neatly by interior space. Despite this and out of a personal need to ‘take’ a place with me, I found myself taking pictures of landscapes whenever I travelled. Taken with no conceptual agenda, the negatives accumulated for years in boxes, denied of any artistic function. This growing personal archive of landscapes forms the basis of Constructed Landscapes.
Photographs initially taken as mere keepsakes across different locations are transformed through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs are a conflation, ‘real’ yet virtual and imaginary. This conflation aims to transform a specific place, initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations, into a space that has been emptied of subjectivity and becomes universal. Through this work, I am interested in creating a space that defies specificity, refers to the transient, and metaphorically blurs space, memory and time.
In dialogue with the history of photography, Constructed Landscapes references early pictorialist tendencies of combination printing as well as modernist experimental techniques such as montage, collage and multiple exposures. While distinctly holding historical references, the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status in relationship to veracity.
