My current work explores the realms of the unconscious mind. This interest has emerged during the present world climate of uncertainty and change, and my growing awareness of how quickly and unexpectedly the everyday things, which we have taken for granted as our reality, can be turned upside down to become a life that is unrecognizable and formidable.
Within my practice I have used the subject of a dark and eerie wood-scape as a metaphor for the mysterious and shadowy areas of the unconscious mind. For me, woodland spaces, with their wild, random undergrowth, hidden pathways, half imagined sounds and movements, mirror the undisclosed, buried areas of the unconscious.
I am particularly interested in states of anxiety, the foreboding and generating a sense of confusion, all of which an intrepid explorer of the unconscious might feel when peering through a constantly thickening veil of illusion, within a wood-scape – potentially a frightening process of dissolution and disintegration.
I use photography and collage processes to suggest how things are constantly changing, altering shape and structure, and through the use of layering, I attempt to convey the deep layers of the mind, and how the recognizable becomes unrecognizable. I also use the process of ice dying on fabric – which creates a dream-like, distorted effect. Thinking about Freud’s iceberg analogy, that there is a much larger portion of the mind “under the water.”
Through the photographic image I take simple views from a woodland setting and use postproduction manipulation to create unpredictable (unnerving) patterns to evoke an uncertainty about what is being seen – challenging the familiar with the unfamiliar.
