Available works

The Garden Construct Series:

Home-grown in Clapham, London

Grown and harvested in my south London garden, the plants included in my work expose the reality of the environment in which they grew. Including these ‘imperfect’ subjects creates a narrative reflecting the challenges our changing climate brings.

Be it petals deformed by a freak hail storm, stunted leaves caused by drought or flowers blooming outside of their typical season, these nuances build a deeper understanding of the environment in which the plants grew and in which we live.

I use no pesticides or herbicides in my garden. This often results in various insects, slugs and snails living on and affecting the plants I am preparing to photograph. Rather than exclude these clusters of greenfly or slug-nibbled petals, this additional context is embraced. It highlights the threatened tapestry of insect life that exists around us and from which we often choose to separate ourselves, despite it being the very base of our own food chain.

The Wild Construct Series:

Urban and roadside sites, various locations

The images in The Wild Construct Series look to create vignettes of an overlooked world. Collected specimens are taken from from specific sites along roadways or areas of land that have seen significant disturbance from humans. These sites were chosen specifically to explore the concept of “plant-blindness”, a phenomenon described as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”. The result of this is we tend to under appreciate the flora around us and often do not see the beauty that exists in the spaces we pass by every day – such as the plants gathered from these roadside sites.

The phenomenon of ‘plant blindness’ in humans is partly caused by the way we categorise the world into immediate threats and non-threats. Because plants barely move, grow close to each other, and are often similar in colour, our brains tend to group these non-threatening organisms together to reduce cognitive load and focus on possible threats. This allows our visual system to filter and clump together plants so we see a mass of green and rarely the individual plant.

By isolating specimens out of context and placing them directly in front of the viewer we are immediately able to focus on the individuals and their details uncovering a typically overlooked world.

Regeneration

Each image also highlights that a natural regeneration of life is possible if not already underway in these disturbed sites and that the degree to which life recovers is dependent on us. 

A core message running through my work is that we already know how to live as part of nature where we impose our needs on our immediate surroundings without catastrophic effects – provided we allow the opportunity for regeneration in our wake.

Farmers and gardeners have done this for centuries before pressures of war then consumerism forced a detrimental change which moved us away from living in-step with the land and a known reliance of those naturally regenerative cycles to a focus on extraction and forced outcomes to fulfil human want.