Like most people I feel as though I’m told too much. As a visual artist looking for sanctuary from the endless onslaught of information I started to see the colour black in photography as a metaphor for the space I felt I needed. A place unreachable and calm where data has no register. A place where there are no answers because there are no questions.  Transcendental. Unsolved and uninvolved. 

The impenetrable flatness of photographic black is a positive. Every pixel used is as alive as those forming the most intricate detail elsewhere. This apparent emptiness is replete with information. I enjoy regarding it as a visual recalcitrance. A reticence. A decision to withhold for the sake of silence, of a private and dignified peace and quiet. Something better, yet overlooked as the scrapings of ai. 

Why have detail at all, why not just pure luxurious blackness? Simply, one can’t have one without the other, it’s as if the details are a threshold into the other way of seeing. 

I feel drawn to this quality and realised this non information resonated with how I was feeling? Does every last thing have to be shared? I wanted to enjoy something not being at my fingertips. 

Is this awareness natural and healthy? Beautiful, even? What is meditation if it’s not an attempt to enter into this emptiness for even a short time. Is it more of an openness? The Outside?

‘Because Black’ is the first serious collection of photographs that I’ve made to explore a theme, the theme of a perceived absence that is simultaneously a requirement, for me at least. 

This collection is literally and metaphorically a series of photographs in which an inability to illuminate a given subject is expressed. An admission that the viewers imagination is needed.  

A physicality is brought to the visual depth by my choice of the most gorgeous paper. Hahnemühle Photo Rag which provides a beautiful velvet-like matt finish, paradoxically optimising ‘the unseeable’. 

High quality wall art that is more than minimal.

Available as hand-signed limited edition giclee prints in 3 sizes