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PHOSSILS (2011)

At the heart of my work often lies photography.
I view ‘photographs’ as objects rather than just images or pictures.
Photographs resemble mere flat visual receipts – fossils: “phossils”.
Whilst photography supports looking and investigating, this process stops once the record is made.
Looking and photographing are two very different exercises. A blink of the eye leaves a residue that
fades into memory; an aperture shuts and holds an inert record which toys with memory.
The former is a human action, the latter, a mechanical – albeit humanly directed – action.
The chasm between these two outcomes – the intangible memorised image and the fossilised visual record – is often the starting point for my work. An ongoing frustration with the outcome (a photograph) and a need to interact further with photographs themselves has led me to creating my own images using photographs as beginnings rather than end results.

CB 2011