Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
- Robert Frost
Heave the anchor short!
Raise main-sail and jib-steer forth,
O little white-hull'd sloop, now speed on really deep waters
(I will not call it our concluding voyage, but outset and sure entrance to truest, best, maturest).
Depart, depart from solid earth,
No more returning to these shores.
-Walt Whitman
The track I’m running on
Won’t be the same when I turn back
It’s useless to follow it straight
I’ll return to another place
I circle around but the sky changes
Yesterday I was a child
I’m a man now
The world’s a strange thing
And the rose among the roses
Doesn’t resemble another rose.
Robert Desnos
I know that all
beneath the moon decays,
And by what mortals
in this world is brought,
In Time’s great periods
shall return to nought,
That fairest states
have fatal nights and days
William Drummond
‘The Cat is driven by hunger, but is free. The Canary has its hunger met, but is not free’.
The Cat and the Canary is about the driving forces of hunger and containment in a family. Hunger manifests itself in many forms, including hope for a new start, desire to learn, and the quest to survive, Containment is about limits on freedom, including the relentless march of time, and fading memories and decline.
The following images are a selection from my self published book.
A project based on found family film negatives layered on contemporary and complementary film positives. The (non-chronological) works sit at the intersection of biography and emigration experiences. The stories are known, partly known or lost. Sample of images from a larger body work.
Sky blue goes dark enough, to see the colours of the city lights. A trail of ruby red and brilliant white, hits her like a sunrise… She always buzzin just like neon, neon, neon, neon. Who knows how long, how long, she can go before she burns away
(lyrics by John Mayer)
Our illusions float on waves of time
like concentric circles in a pond.
Time recedes from the moment’s splash
and the ripples widen into waves of stillness
where time becomes nothing.
Clocks lie, there is no time.
(from Duane Michals, Questions without Answers)
From 1925 to 1934, Alfred Stieglitz took more than 200 photographs of clouds, generally recognised as some of the first abstract photographic works of art, free from distinct subject matter. The photographs in this gallery page were taken in the same location at different dates, reflecting the temporal nature of the heavens.
“Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It is all that ever is or all that ever was or ever will be … approaching the greatest of mysteries” Carl Sagan
Inspired by the universe, my exhibition Cosmos reflects the dynamic forces at play on both the grandest and smallest of scales. Drawing on contemporary cosmology, astrophysics and quantum theory, this sample of 8 original, organic, and etching-like photographs can be seen as fragments, ripped from the heavens, making visible traces of the seen and unseen.
