Underlying the works and exhibitions documented on this website is desire to explore in new ways what it is to see and be seen, what it is to touch and to be touched, and the consequences of visibility or touch being withheld. Also, to question how images move between mediums and through the world, how they shape consciousness and the perception of time, and what it means to represent and to be represented. Indivisible from all this is a fascination with the embodied nature of human thought, the embeddedness of humanity in technology, and the play between the visual and the verbal.

The earliest works here date from 2007 and emerged out of an interest in making paintings that fundamentally undermined photographic reproduction. The paintings were hard to see and hard to pin down, characterised by unstable appearance and a sense of permanent becoming rather than enduring identity. Recent works broadly divide into two groups. There are representational works on metal that develop from the earlier works, presenting or withholding images depending on the light. They are haunted by a fascination with touch and trauma and love and horror—which might not be saying anything more than that they are concerned with what it is to be human, where we come from, and where we are heading. The other group develop from digital images made using a bellows camera containing, as the photographic plate, a modified digital scanner. In these works historical and digital processes are combined in order to reimagine the basic nature of a photograph: although no area is exposed for more than a fraction of a second, each work compresses into a single image periods of time ranging from a minute to somewhat over half an hour.

I studied at Chelsea and the Slade before completing a practice-led doctorate at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where I currently teach. I am represented by Hidde van Seggelen Gallery, Hamburg. I have held research fellowships at Yale and Oxford and published articles in scholarly journals such as October, The Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, British Art Studies, and the Sculpture Journal. These have addressed such themes as the impact of emerging understandings of electricity on nineteenth-century landscape painting, the influence of photomechanical reproduction on early twentieth-century sculpture, and puppets in recent video art. A couple of interrelated book projects have stimulated me for many years, one on disembodied hands and embodied thought, the other on John Constable and the boundaries of painting.