It began with sheets of black sugar paper tacked onto the tiled wall above the bath, a flash gun in my hand and my camera on its tripod. I started the camera’s 10-second timer and waited until just before the shutter opened. I threw a wine glass full of milk into the air and upon hearing the shutter open, pressed the pilot lamp to trigger the flash. Unique, irregular shapes of milk, frozen mid-air by the flash, were captured for a fraction of a second before falling into the bath. These photographs lay dormant from 2011 until 2018, where the decision was made to combine them to create more complex compositions. The energy of the original photographs was transformed into something that suggested growth. They resembled the explosion of a flowering plant. From this point, I began my Lifeforms project. The project continued as I returned to photographing plastic bags, an area I’d previously explored as a precursor to my typologies. The plastic, which was easily manipulated, gave an abundance of unexpected forms. The decision to use the orange hue of a Sainsbury bag, contrasting with the black backdrop, gave me the impression of lifeforms discovered from depths of the ocean. My next material was paper. This had the versatility of being a different texture when water was added. It also had a tendency to create satisfying gradients. As with the milk, I presented the photographs in colour, which resulted in some unexpected hues when images were overlaid. The purples and blues revealed an extra depth, that suggested deep inner complexities to the forms. Finally, I chose pencils shavings to represent wood, as the last material in the series. The challenge of having a prescribed shape that came out of the sharpener, ensured there was a particular style to the final set. As with the other materials explored, there was sense of dynamism within the arrangement. The compositions hint at the appearance of life, something that is intrinsically built into our experiences and understanding of the world triggers this response. I feel that the instinct that guided my positioning of the images was propelled by the same universal knowledge we all use to identify the presence of life.
