‘Caveman Bill’  35 min video loop, 2006-7.

In a collaboration with Yukon resident Caveman Bill, I produced a slow 360° panning shot of the inside of Bill’s cave, which he has lived in for the past 12 years. Bill narrates the stories of all the objects we see in the room/cave, from a cool-box he found floating down the Yukon river, to a stove he inherited from 2by4 Bob. The stories and reading of the image both confirm and deny romantic interpretations of Bill’s life in the far north.

Created from materials found in the streets around a disused office block near the Tate Modern, I have made an installation for this video half way between a viewing booth and Bills cave. As the text explores the representation of the objects in the video, the viewing booth/cave explores the functionality and aesthetics of its own construction.

‘Horizon’ C type print, 2007.

In this piece large format photos of the Atlantic horizon are combined with text panels that recount my journey from London to Montreal on a container ship.

The ‘travel diary’ monologue explores my desire for a clear sense of definition and identity in my departure and the foreign, and the slow material process of crossing the ocean. The text embroiders the formality of the image, the simple division of sky and sea with a more uncertain sense of identity.

The piece questions the relationship between text and image, traveller and foreign ‘other’.

Aswell as existing as wall panels it will be published in book form by Canadian publisher ‘Parasitic Ventures Press’.

‘Virtual Object’ motion sensing projection, 2007

A video projection on the wall of a dimly lit room. As you enter you see the image of a rock suspended on the wall, you move closer, or to the side, the rock begins to revolve and rotate, tracking and translating your movements into equal and opposite movements; in the manner of a reflection.  The specimen of rock is a piece of gold ore found on a spaghetti western location in southern Spain.

The image is created using a ‘global portrait’ (a photo from every angle) of the rock, combined with  motion-sensing software written for me by the technical department of The Banff Centre, Canada. This animates the virtual image of the rock to respond to the viewers movements in the room, as if it were 3d.  

‘Virtual Object’ juxtaposes a geological sense of identification of the rock with a personal sense of identification of self as object in the ‘mirror’ and the technology of the spectacle, representation and seduction.

‘City, Forest’ C type prints, dimensions variable, 2005-

This project is made up of large format photos of trees, singley amongst the infrastructure of buildings, flyovers and billboards of the city.

I photograph them in series to emphasise the forest for the trees, and the uncanny sense of nature infiltrating the city. This plays with the polarisations of ‘nature/civilisation’ ‘wilderness/city’  to suggest more porous relationships.

The genetic diversity of the plant population of London is greater than that of the surrounding countryside. Species from all over the world inhabit the garden centres, parks and micro climates of the city, flourishing and creating volatile ecosystem of their own. Like a botanical reference book or explorers catalogue of plants, this project records the trees of the city, but makes no attempt to structure them into classifiacations,  native or  invasive, species or genera.

‘Untitled’ 2003-05. 81x35cm. C print.

In this piece I explore the relationship of a tragically meaningful event, a man dying on my doorstep, to the ‘everyday’ of the day that follows.

The text recounts the events of the day and embroiders the image with various meanings and interpretations, that change as the narrative progresses from an anonymous street corner to the site of a murder, and back again.

‘Link House’ 45 min dvd loop, 2004

The ‘Link House’ is an industrial space that I have lived in. With a slow panning shot I show all the objects in the building, while narrating their stories and what lead them to be there.

The descriptions shift between ‘objective’ descriptions, subjective associations and personal digressions, tracking a web of relations. It is both a desription of objects and through them the space I inhabit between them.

‘and a green mirrored glass wall covering the side of a twenty storey building’ Book. 85 pages, 32 x 22cm. 2003

A list of every object in every photo taken from a train window between New York and Los Angeles.

The text has no punctuation, each object  named becomes a fragment in a continuouse whole that spans the distance between one side of a continent and another.

‘WOLSELEY/THOMAS MR’. Book. 52 pages. A3. 2003

This book is a record of every receipt received on a journey around the South West of America, printed front and back.

Unlike an 18th century explorer’s record this does not so much document what I find in the exotic; birds, plants, ‘natives’, but records the  receipts of the journey as specimens, evidence of the processes and systems that contain me and the iconic landscape of the South West of America.

The book combines ideas of the frontier prevalent  in images of the American South West and the the processes of the conceptual and financial infrastructure that contain it.

The title is my name as it appears on my credit card receipts.

‘Right Here, Some Other Time’ Sound Installation, climate of Change II. 2008.

The sculpture is improvised using material found on site, an old piece of shuttering ply, some strange fluorescent felt left over from a Mercedes marketing day (the exhibition was in an old car showroom). It loosely acquires a minimalist aesthetic from the haphazard materials found on site. On closer inspection the construction of the objects prove to be provisional, only good enough to provide an initial impression, in the manner of a scenery prop.

When you put on the headphones at first it seems there is no change, the drone of traffic, the echoe of the space are the same. But slowly a dislocation becomes apparent, the sounds are indeed the same but out of synch, the traffic outside the window moves off to silence and then later raws into life, the footsteps of someone pass infront of you, but there is no one there.

On the head phones is a binaural recording of the same space before the installation of the show. The sound track slips and shifts the perception of the viewer, appearing to be one thing before sliding into another, confusing the sense of the present with another time, in the manner of Déjà Vu.

This shift of perception, of the ‘here and now’ to the ‘some other time’ of the sound track, and the ‘minimalist object’ to haphazard collection of bits, questions the formalism of our own perceptions.

For the next project I would like to use the same technique of the binaural recording of the space, but accompany the piece with a large piece of 50% mirrored glass, leaning against the wall that would allow you to see yourself, as well as through mirror to the gallery wall. It would be titled 'Double Blind'.