Q: What makes this work yours, separate and apart from other works. What about this work speaks to your personal viewpoint, and what you want to place into the world?

A: I love this body of work because it was the first time I had thrown myself into using imagery I have photographed rather than sourced or found. I think my work will always have a line of evolution through the different processes I decide to pursue. The photos were taken on a trip to Sri Lanka at the end of 2019. They feel especially significant now, as this trip ended just before the pandemic started. I think about myself then as almost naive and innocent to the impending catastrophe. At the time, I really didn’t want to intrude on my surroundings and I didn’t have much experience with cameras, so I decided to limit myself to images I took either on my phone or a very basic 35 mm camera. I had no expectations regarding how the artworks would turn out, which allowed me to move without pressure or directed purpose. I was able to take photos based purely on instinct and curiosity, to be led into images with a sense of discovery. When I arrived back to my studio in London from Sri Lanka, what I found while collaging with the photographs was how attracted I am to capturing snippets of human interaction within their surroundings. The photographs I’d captured all had this silent observer, fly-on-the-wall viewpoint. I was often looking out of a window of a train, car, or house, seeing someone or something that was not looking back at me. When I wasn’t looking out of a window, I often found that I captured images while just sitting in the same location, watching and waiting for something or someone to walk into the frame. As I began the collaging process for these works, I focused on exploring and drawing attention to a relationship between people/animals and our environment, all the things happening that can be seen by an unnoticed party.