I get asked all the time where my ideas come from and I always wish I had a better answer. But the truth is I often don’t really know. I don’t know why I express the things I do, in the way that I do, at least not in a conscious way. It feels like it comes from a part of me that I can’t explain in any logical or coherent way. Which is not to say that I think it’s an accident. It just means that I believe in a part of the human consciousness that doesn’t communicate with us in the ways we know and expect.
I wasn’t always an artist and I sometimes feel like this is both a blessing and a curse. There’s a lot of pressure on us as artists to have a coherent and communicable vision for our work, to have meticulously planned out and thought about every element.
Coming from a different background perhaps makes me more willing to say that I don’t plan everything in my shoots. I start with a far more loose idea about the emotion or the mood I want to create and I find my way organically by playing with different ideas and different shapes and colours. Perhaps this is why I take self portraits. I’m a patient model for myself, allowing the process to evolve naturally, as it usually does.
I wasn’t always this way. Something happened to me after I quit my office job in 2010. I had always wanted to create but had never found the time or the right medium for me. I was good in English class and I loved reading so everyone assumed that, if I was going to create, it would be as a writer. But I just never felt comfortable writing. It always felt so far removed from what I was trying to express. Just like when you have a picture in your head and when you try to draw it, it just won’t come out right. I could write reasonably well so I didn’t put it down to a lack of ability.
It was something else. It was as if what I was trying to say wasn’t verbal. It didn’t come to me in words. It came to me in image fragments, as if it were something trying to break through years of corporate life in the only way it could. These fragments were moments of a bigger story, but they were definitely visual moments. And when I was trying to express them verbally, they were getting lost in translation.
They were like dreams. Non linear. Nonsensical. Out of time. Out of context. Highly symbolic yet highly ambiguous.
I happened to come to art school to study photography at the moment in my life I was most open. I had been tightly wrapped up in a busy life for years, but I had left it all behind for a period of wandering.
I wandered to Bali, where I trained as a yoga teacher. I wandered to Thailand, where I fasted and cleansed my body of toxins. I wandered to Northern Scotland where I breathed in the crystal clean air and discovered that I could write….I just didn’t want to. And I wandered to New Hampshire, where I met my people and faced my fears of rejection at an art retreat by a lake.
On that retreat I took these pictures of myself on the dock at sunrise. These were some of my very first self portraits. Already I was using self portraits as an almost meditative exercise to open up my creativity.
Finally I wandered into art school and into the illustration section of the library. And it felt like everything in my life had happened to bring me to that moment. Of course that’s the case with every moment, but some just feel more significant than others.
Sitting looking through these visual storybooks, I wondered if I could bring the dreamlike fragments of my imagination into life in this way. I wondered if I could somehow illustrate my own internal story. A story that had been forgotten or lost.
And that’s how “Tales from the Moors Country” was born. It was born so that I could communicate what I can’t communicate in any other way. To share what I can’t share in any other way. So that I could be heard. Understood. So that, without me ever having to say “this picture is about…….” one day someone would say “Me too.” And we’d both feel better.
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