I'll be the maverick and you be the bourgeios

Over the last two years I have acquired an abundance of wedding invitations and thank you cards and I began to notice just how many of the people that surround me were getting hitched. I was prompted to produce work about marriage, the wedding ceremony and celebrations and I have employed some of these wedding artifacts in the construction of my photographs. In making these works I have researched the history of some of the traditional symbols associated with marriage and the wedding ceremony and have incorporated them in the work. I have sought to reveal marriage symbols as commodified objects removed from the significance they are intended to portray. For instance, the diamond ring has replaced the humble thimble through commercial opportunism; the swan, traditionally a symbol of fidelity and life-long commitment, has been found in recent research to be a promiscuous bird.

'Still' Life

This work explores my developing interest in the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny. I am attempting to reflect Freud’s idea of negative aesthetics and seeking to understand the circumstances in which the familiar can become uncanny.

This work merges the idea of the familiar and the uncanny by playfully exploring the notion of Still Life within the context of the domestic, but emphasising the relationship between the body, its parts and domestic objects. I want this work to challenge the preconceptions of the traditional still life genre but at the same time create discomfort in the viewer. While holding on to some traditional still life artefacts I have introduced interesting juxtapositions to create a sense of out-of-placeness. In this case “life” has been in-still-ed in the image in the form of living elements.