Silent, Dark and Deep, 2009

Silent, Dark and Deep, 2009 The forests depicted in my work are those of the imagination, residual traces of real places amalgamated into single scenes by the passing of time. Exploring the fine line between reality and a constructed visual fantasy they draw on the strangeness that lies beneath the surface of the commonplace. The dark and shadowed spaces lure and repel the imagination of the viewer, as the woodland becomes a world of psychological uncertainty. The brightly lit foregrounds of each image are soothing and accessible but beyond these and divided from them by flimsy fences or boundaries are the dark voids of the forest interiors, reflecting the undertones of danger and anxiety that thread through adult life. The juxtaposition of safe and unsafe plays out in the way that spaces are characterized as light, safe and beautiful, or dark and unsafe, alluring yet dangerous, and addresses this dichotomy within concepts of beauty and pleasure. The long format of the images emphasizes the boundary line, the delineation between inside and outside, welcome and unwelcome, light and shadowed darkness, beauty and danger. Laden with anticipation and curiosity these forest-scapes draw on a more naive and fundamental perception of beauty, imbued with latent meaning, potentiality and expectation, whilst the tenuous and fragile nature of each boundary disrupts the status of a clear delineation between the actual and the virtual. These images are made by moving the camera and tripod sideways in increments along a linear trajectory creating a series of images of the scene. These are blended together to form a seamless single frame that contains multiple perspective viewpoints. This constructed experience of the landscape does not describe the forest as appears in real life, it is an ‘imagination’, reflecting the notion that the work is concerned with a landscape of unseen but perceived potentiality. 200cm x 70cm