From A Change of Method, Not a Change of Question

My transition from painting to photography was not a rejection of one medium in favour of another. It changed where I looked for the questions that had occupied my work from the beginning.

I began painting during a period when ideas of stability, control and personal responsibility had become uncertain. The early works gave form to experiences that were difficult to articulate directly: pressure, vulnerability, confinement and the attempt to regain a capacity for action.

In Resilience and Freedom, these concerns remained close to individual experience. Figures, wings, fractured surfaces and open spaces expressed the tension between vulnerability and the possibility of acting despite it.

Over time, the questions moved beyond the individual.

Fragile Balance brought these concerns into contact with collective life. Protection and control, freedom and responsibility, individual intention and shared consequence could no longer be treated as separate matters. The paintings explored these tensions through constructed figures, materials and spatial relationships.

But their worlds remained my constructions.

I determined the setting, the symbols and the relationships between them. A barrier, a ruin or an opening existed because I had placed it there. Even when the painting questioned control, I retained considerable control over the conditions in which that question appeared.

Conversations around my first solo exhibition made this distinction increasingly important. When discussions moved from painted situations to actual places and photographs, questions of access, responsibility and social order became more concrete. They concerned environments people already inhabited, often without having chosen the arrangements governing them.

I wanted to examine those arrangements without first inventing the world in which they appeared.

Photography introduced a reality that could resist my intentions.

A street exists before I photograph it. A barrier already serves a purpose. A timetable coordinates movement whether or not I am present. These things carry decisions, histories and consequences that cannot be reduced to the meaning I assign them.

Photography did not remove my control. I still choose the position, the frame, the moment and the sequence. But those choices now encounter circumstances that I have not constructed and cannot fully determine.

This also changed how I understood the relationship between personal experience and the work.

The uncertainty from which I had begun painting remained relevant, but it no longer needed to become the subject of each image. Questions that once concerned individual agency could be examined through the material conditions within which people act.

The city offered a particularly concentrated field for this investigation. Streets, transport systems, commercial spaces, thresholds and infrastructures make collective life possible while directing and limiting individual action. They are produced and maintained by people, yet no single person determines how they operate.

The move to photography was therefore not a move from subjective expression to objective observation.

It was a move from constructing the conditions of an image to working with conditions that already existed.

The photograph remains an intervention. Framing and sequence create relationships of their own. But they must contend with a world that precedes them.

That tension continues to shape the work.