I’m a London based mixed-discipline conceptual photographer, retoucher and digital artist who collaborates with a small group of creatives that range from Indi film makers, to photographers and artists, across many diciplines.
My creative background includes old-skool web design, 20 years of photoshop and digital art tools, conventional painting and drawing, video editing, post production, and a recent BA in photography, that was analogue-centric, so I’m a darkroom-mushroom and print maker too.
Within my personal practice I like to probe personal and universal concepts like identity and masquerade, social conventions and constructs such as conforming and compliance, stigma and stereotyping, as well as technological constructs, the platform (which is all the technology we use in our modern lives), our pseudo-cyborg existence, mental health and sociology in relation to all the above.
I’m also a maker and crafter. I enjoy the analogue-to-digital process.
I like to take the physical objects I make into my digital workspace and often back again into the analogue as prints or even as an installation.
I like to take the physical objects I make into my digital workspace and often back again into the analogue as prints or even as an installation.
Beyond this, I’m also a tech and technologist (yes, I’m a sci-fi nerd too), and a gamer. I do like to create with technology and art as I find they are a perfect pairing.
In recent years I’ve watched, with interest, how the creative space has evolved with the rise of LLM, GANS and generative AI, as well as the rise of NFT’s as a tradable solution for art.
At present I’m creating bodies of works that speak to (in a “flip” manner) the AI mass-production processes now available to all.
My most recent body of work, Faitours Forge, started out as a making process, that was digitally photographed, with some exhibited as a series of Kodak Metallic C-Type prints, that were then substantially re-worked into the current iteration of NFT works, in collaboration with NINA.
These works expand on the original concepts of the project, drawing attention to the digital artworks process and, importantly, they highlight that you don't actually need AI to mass produce imagery, nor do you need tools like photoshop, scripts or generative iterations and such either.
These works are simple analogue hand-crafted and decorated pieces, turned digital and edited in Adobe Lightroom only. No photoshop and no other tools were used.
*For those of you who are familiar with Lightroom, you will know it is a digital darkroom, not a pixel editor; wherein I pushed the boundaries of what you can do in this digital space, to get the results you see in the Faitours Forge series.
*For those of you who are familiar with Lightroom, you will know it is a digital darkroom, not a pixel editor; wherein I pushed the boundaries of what you can do in this digital space, to get the results you see in the Faitours Forge series.
Faitours Forge is a portrayal of the relationship between identity and masquerade, the interplay between always-on connectivity, intrusive technology and the platform. There is a powerful yet hypocritical duality of the platform’s questioning of self-worth and self-identification, whilst it duplicitously facilitates self-gratification, fulfilling the egotistical desire to be noticed, valued, praised, and adored.
We, the participants, masked behind the platform, perform for the world to see. As individuals, we’re assimilated by technological osmosis - into this ever-expanding metaverse, where the core persona is shaped, formed and informed through environmental and technological feedback, as a cognitive process.
This is where the meta-self is forged. A subset of personas distinct from those which we carry into the physical world. They are virtual, yet we value and defend them and their existence, to the core.
Water, Earth, Air, Fire - Mythological tropes employed to bring sense to the chaos of identity, repurposed and technologically reinterpreted through my masks, serve as metaphors for the physicality of device, our pseudo-cyborg state of being, the handing over of self-sufficiency to technology.
The "Stage"; a construct symbolising the opaque cloak of platforms, the technological-medium we now exist within.
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A small selection of the materials used
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Setting the stage for the "Avatar" part of this series
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