15.4.09

Early influences on my photography





I remember visiting Photographers Gallery with my mother before starting university and seeing the exhibition of small black and white images of Francesca Woodman. Seeing Woodman's work that day completely changed something within me. Her photography is so personal and individual that it's like seeing the view of a room from the inside of her mind. Here is a photographer who seemed to live her art. She recorded sets and situations that you could imagine were her real surroundings every day. She committed suicide at age 22 and this just breaks my heart that she is gone and not still showing us her view of the world through her camera.

You can see from my notebooks and my work at University that I was influenced by her. I think I connected with how she presented spaces and people and her interest in ephemera. I discovered her after feeling like I'd never find another photographer's work more beautiful then Robert Frank's The Lines Of My Hand .


Photos copyright of Francesca Woodman and Robert Frank

Old notebooks for personal project



Drawings from my sketchbook



14.4.09

The Start

This is it. This is the end of worrying about whether these thoughts and works are interesting enough for people to see. The end of years spent thinking about showing this stuff and the beginning of thinking less and just going for it. It seems to have been a simple decision in the end so goodness knows what's taken me so long. Sometimes I feel like I get obsessed with trying to figure out the point of a thing or the need to know how a thing will turn out. This has created an inertia within me. So hopefully these sentences are the start of some movement in my creative life. I hope if you do follow this train of thought of mine, that it will bring you some pleasure or at the very least, interest you enough to waste a little time on ;-)

I'm not one for keeping a diary because I don't like routine. I'll not be writing about politics or the state of the economy because I'm not interested and don't really know what's going on. You can expect some insight into photography and art and literature maybe. I might review or present things that I like, that I think you might too. I'll also be brave and put my stuff up here and I'm hoping this little space of mine will motivate me to make new work. Be that a cup cake or a canvas, a doodle on a napkin or a list of nonsense words from my the recesses of my mind. Please drop by when you have the time.

Starting with something to fill in the blank space