"Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world."
- Arnold Newman (1918 - 2006)
I am a picture maker. I think I’ve always been one. I am also a dreamer. I grew up with utopian stories of frontier life that instilled in me a deep love of western lifestyles and the history behind it. Wildlife and birds, the western landscape, plants, and people all play a part in the bigger story. From as far back as I can remember I’ve occupied my time with making pictures as an escape from a sometimes harsh world. Pictures that often represented a bygone era or way of life far removed from reality.
I spent 14 years working with textiles which created an awareness of how texture and colour can represent mood and feeling. The theories learned there eventually found their way into my photographs, which lead me to discover the work of Pictorialist photographers and their expressive images reminiscent of the great paintings at that time. It is with a combination of traditional techniques, historical ideas and contemporary tools that I approach photography, using the camera more as a paintbrush than a mechanical device.
Truth and reality are constantly manipulated to suit the agendas of the individual. In my images, I am manipulating the truth as an escape from reality to express my dreams and personal visions of the world. It isn't based so much on what exists, as it is on what I wish existed - a constructed representation. There is a romanticized feeling of a world that is at once full of joy and deep sadness, like something found is easily lost. A nostalgic longing for a simpler time when the world was full of innocence. I am not interested in documenting reality. What is reality anyway? I leave that interpretation for the viewer to decide.Download a pdf copy of my Artist's Statement. 
"The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. The meaning is constructed by the system of representation."- Stuart Hall
