Association of Photographers Awards, Exhibition and Book. Sadlers Wells Theatre, Roseberry Avenue, London, March 26, 2007; Association of Photographers Gallery, Leonard St., London, 8-18 May, 2007
Four of my photographs from a new series entitled Within were selected to represent the genre of still life in The Association of Photographers Awards 2007 where I won won a Bronze award for merit. The Awards, launched in 1983, annually attract over 4000 images submitted annually by AOP members; the work is judged rigorously by a panel of esteemed professionals composed of curators, commissioners from advertising agencies, art directors from design groups and magazines. The 15 judges for 2007 included Louise Shannon, Curator of Photographs at the V &A Museum, Jo Casey: art director Saatchi & Saatchi, and Ben Cole: Art Buyer VCCP. The Awards exhibition was held at the Association of Photographers Gallery, London from 8-18 May 2007. My constructed images have been produced as hand printed C type photographs sized 16” x 12”.
The four images selected for the Awards appear in a two-page spread in the Association of Photography Awards book (APO, 2007) Image magazine (no. 379, April 2007) also devoting two pages to my work.
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s chapters on nests shells, miniatures, and intimate immensity in the Poetics of Space, my research sets out to re-evaluate still life as representation, depicting an enclosed world.
The series presents an intimate view of a limited domain, an inner chamber, suffused with delicate light. The photographs represent a fugitive, disordered beauty within an airless, humid enclosure.
The images systematically analyze the complex, tangled inter-relationships between decomposing plants in the process of dying through the suffocating heat and intense lack of moisture. The symbiotically intertwined desiccated roots and twigs allude metaphorically to an inner state of regret and loss. The work reflects on notions of transience, vulnerability and impermanence which are consistent themes throughout all my work.
