Throughout my work I have been primarily interested in the suggestive possibilities between the images, and the open narrative I can create by juxtaposing the interior and exterior world beside each other. Portraits next to landscape, for example, and the tension between these two environments.

Whilst there are reoccurring motifs and symbols that appear throughout, the importance is on mood, metaphor and emotion, and how different subjects can both carry these feelings and somehow come together, creating my own ambiguous black and white world - similar in a way to the surrealist 1920's film noir.

Birds are frequent symbols that appear throughout the work. Inspired by mythology, they assume a variety of roles. They have been symbols of power and freedom throughout the ages, and are seen to link the human world to the divine. Silhouetted birds in the cloud scape, brooding vistas, faces emerging from darkness, all come together in an attempt to produce an imaginative and mysterious landscape.

Early visual influences for me have been Caravaggio and Francis Bacon, beginning with a general attraction to the darker sensibilities of each artists work and it's sometimes macabre nature. The use of stark, direct lighting and heavy shadows in Caravaggio's pieces, as well Bacon's apparent painted 'blur' have both made their technical influences.

By shooting 35mm black and white film and layering negatives together during the scanning stage, as well as the use of surface scratching and inscriptions to the negative, I try evoke a dream like detachment of an earlier age.

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