Echoes and Illusions

These photographs are intended to engage the viewers subconscious. They are highly coloured and richly textured. The internal mirroring, using the “Rorschach” effect, can appear strange and beautiful, or bizarre and disturbing. Since Leonardo de Vinci and Botticelli in the renaissance, “ambiguous designs” have been used to assess personality. And in 1921 Rorschach created the standardized inkblot test. There are ten official blots of near-perfect bilateral symmetry. Rorschach inkblots have been widely used to study the individual’s phycology, imagination, consciousness, personality and mental health of both children and adults. The analysis of inkblot tests is hugely complex and also controversial. But the enduring fascination is how the same shapes produce such different responses and interpretations in each individual. Layering details from 17th Baroque painting, and my own still life photographs, these surreal juxtapositions are created, and strangeness appears in the spaces in-between.

Recent Solo Exhibitions 2021 - Wanton Boys - Chelsea Arts Club 2021 - Strange Shadows - Putney Gallery 2017 - Looking on Darkness - Viewfinder Gallery 2016 - Scenes of Deceit - Chelsea Arts Club 2013 - Strange Fruit - The Art Gallery Wales 2011 - Thinking makes it so - Aldeburgh 2010 - Beautiful and Damned - Hoxton Gallery 2010 - Strange Shadows - Association of Photographers Gallery 2010 - Phantoms of Delight - Archer's Soho 2008 - It’s Your Turn - Chelsea Gallery 2006 - Becoming - Chelsea Gallery 2005 - Silent Lives - Blue Room Soho 2003 - No Such Thing - Chelsea Gallery