Five

As young children growing up in small-town New Zealand, my brother, a friend and I used to play in an abandoned building. The different rooms were in varying states of disrepair, often containing objects that appealed to us. We gathered these trinkets and put them into the cleanest room, essentially creating a hideout. Whilst the specific histories of places that I visit are, conceptually- and personally-speaking, irrelevant, there is a sympathy for that which is stagnant or neutered by external forces. In contrast to urban exploration, which is often adrenaline-fuelled, my work is a formalised process and is more about reading and activating spaces that have somehow been disconnected from society.What or who is not there? What can’t we quite see? How do we overcome the helplessness of not being able to ground an image in a time line?
The images are an attempt to exploit this helplessness and the illusion of reality to create a more visceral, rather than intellectual, response to images.