Escape

My hotchpotch collages involving different visual representative methods come together under the title of photography, since photographs are where all my images commence. Each picture begins with a simple photograph of a friend or relative which is then built upon, both physically and through Photoshop, incorporating my drawings, paintings and collages.

Within my work, layering multiple images on top of one another creates a more vivid depiction of reality than a single facsimile. We never see life frozen as it is in a photograph, we see flickers of light and ever changing reflections, piled on top of people and pictures surrounding us as soon as we open our eyes. Everything is transitory and everything we see changes as the sun moves imperceptibly through the sky. Within my work, I have attempted to put different perspectives and experiences together to create an intense feeling of existence, you are not looking at the moment from outside, you are living it.

This expression of the transitory nature of life was my conscious intention behind the work. Something that also happened throughout this project was that it became an outlet for my emotions. After experiencing a series of traumas in my young adult life, I naturally turned to my practice as a release from reality. My work became my rest, my escape, my hope and (now) my answer as I battled anxiety and depression. This form of accidental self-therapy comes across through the manic and detailed stylistic features of the pieces, feeding into the emotive and immersive overall effect.

I hope that through making these images I can teach people that photography is more than just a means of representing things we already know and understand, the photograph can be used to see inside ourselves and to question everything that we are.