ABOUT

I am an award-winning independent photographer with a BA(Hons) in Communication Design (Photography) from The Glasgow School of Art. 

My interest in photography undoubtedly stems from being told as a child to keep my hands off my dad’s camera.  I loved everything about this box of tricks and would regularly sneak a hold of it, revelling in its physicality, but early on at least, not understanding how it related to the slideshows we often shared with neighbours or the photographs in the family album.

I was given a Kodak Instamatic when I was about eight years old.  It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of my dad’s precious Retinette but I loved the glossy flash cubes and the square prints that came back from the chemists.  However, it was only once I reached my forties that I considered exploring the medium further.  I was lucky enough to be taught by Bob McEwen and Eugene Crummie at what was then Clydebank College, and with their guidance and encouragement went on to art school. Bob, Eugene and then Andy Stark at GSA pushed me beyond existing limits and forced me to confront what it was that I found so compelling about photographs and what it was that I wanted to say.  

When I was younger, there seemed to be a general assumption that I’d make a living through writing. I can’t say I was as convinced as some others, and the more time I spent looking at, thinking about and making photographs, the more I realised that my voice needed images to tell my stories, if not instead of words, then absolutely in addition.

It’s not just that I’m intrigued by the way the content or aesthetics of photographs convey meaning and represent experience, but also in the role that the act of photography plays: in our families, in perpetuating our sense of self and belonging, in bolstering our mental health, in recording layers of experience and in sharing our stories.  Photographs seem to me to be part document, part performance, part history, and part fortune-telling, and so today, as well as offering professional photographic services on a freelance basis, I continue to concentrate on personal projects that explore such themes. I continue to relish the magic of photographic processes, both digital and analogue, which seem to peel away slices of light and time for us to treasure and read at our own discretion.

Much of my work is concerned with ideas of home and family. I’m interested in the different ways that people create a sense of belonging or identity through repeated gestures, performative activities and objects - interested in our attachment to objects as a projection of self. However I’m also aware that our insistence on using things to represent our allegiances and our personalities is part of why we are creating so much waste, and is part of why our mental health has never been so fragile. Environmental issues, social or economic issues, mental health issues, family, and identity are not discrete topics of interest. They intermingle and push up against each other every day. They are intertwined into everyone’s existence and so I hope that even work made on a very personal level might reflect the experiences and thoughts of others in some way too.