HorseScapes,

         
        
This is a series of realised landscapes developed whilst living in the Tuscan countryside.

 

Yet Another Stitch Up

This mini project was really put together at the end of last summer and charts a series of really rather relaxed situations. The format used for this series was an Iphone and a free application called auto stitch.
The new 'democracy of photography' (as coined by David Levi Strauss and many others) has been an interest of mine for quite a period of time now, the digital medium has become accessible due to both its cost and now quality, making it no longer a pursuit solely for the wealthy or professional. There is no better example of this as Alec Soth addresses in an interview, "What does it mean to be a photographer today, when 500,000 images are being posted up on to Facebook every second." This can I believe, only be a question which each individual is able answer once it has been fully considered.
Within this work I have used myself as the subject and those experiences, experienced as my subject matter. What I have always liked about this kind of stitch up is not only the abstract shapes the frames form, but the idea of being able to see almost all of an area within a still image, and these images span the breadth of Britain, Mallorca and Toscana, depicting a certain honest mundanity.

A Journey

It was whilst I was fortunate enough to be taken to some natural thermal springs in Toscana that I conceived this little piece.

It came back to me that at night the camera is able to capture the types of exposures which the human eye is just not capable of rendering. The machine is able record all that is put before it (given the chosen settings) as accurately as it is happening.

So by choosing to make a series of long exposures I have sought to uncover the unseen or under appreciated.

Within the images I have portrayed a typical journey which has a beginning and an end. However I also see thirteen separate landscapes, with a fairly consistent horizon. I feel that these images represent a state in which a populous have found it easy to exist; in a world where a constant effort is made to subvert nature and all of its affects.

A philosopher once mused on the notion of being an extraterrestrial coming to within good sight of the earth, wondering what it is, and who might be down there.

However once it became so close as it was able to see the streaming lights, clouds of smog and destructive nature of what was inhabiting the planet. It was likened to a cancerous cell or series of malignant tumours; thus deciding to keep going on past the place many call home.

I have sought in this series of images to highlight the synthetic nature of outdoor spaces. The ways in which a participant is now directed without subversion through a series of malignant places, in which it has been lost, the idea of harnessing nature through an interaction to be able to travel in the directions desired.

Stories from Splott

Splott was the area that I received for my grid project and after visiting it a number of times I started to recognize that much of it had been re-built in recent decades.
So it was whilst looking on a BBC website that I came across a section entitled ‘Stories from Splott’ which provided a forum for people to be able to post up there memories of the area whilst they where growing up.
Reading through these I began noticing a repetition in the way that every persons memories where linked in parts to physical objects that they either played with or a food and smell that they could grasp onto. Picking up on this I decided to make a series of still life images representing an object that stands out in each individual story.
Choosing to make the pictures in front of a black backdrop I wanted to create an aesthetic that one would associate to the notion of remembrance, directing light at the given objects I wanted them to be the sole focus of the image in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, which I intended to be a play on the notion of only easily remembering the reminiscent events of the past.
I think that each of the memories gives not only a wealthy understanding of the social conditions of their past but also a hint as to how people and situations change in the future. With many ‘Splotties’ now living further a field in America and Australia due to both health and economic conditions one starts to form a picture of how people, large and small migrate around the world, still clinging onto moments lost in a bid to maintain a sense of place.

Bryn Davies, Cowbridge

My Aunty Shirley as a young girl from school went to work at CWS's biscuit factory at the top of Railway Street. This huge Victorian factory's gate was a magnet to every small Splott child at 5pm every Friday evening. The factory girls were allowed to take home a big blue paper bag of broken biscuits. This share of the damaged biscuits was heaven to a small child whose household was still under food rationing after World War Two. "Give us a broker misses?" was the call from our gang of kids. When my Aunty Shirley appeared I followed her home where my grandmother Rosie would spread the blue bag's contents over the kitchen table to be sorted the best for the biscuit barrel, sometime we would find a chocolate covered biscuit, a treasure for a 7 year old.

Tracy ( Ashmore ) Bray in Los Angeles California
I love the fact I came from Splott and Tremorfa, it prepared me for the world, good and bad, and let me tell you Tremorfians and Splotties, we can roll with the best of them and win. Maybe it was the cold water in Splott baths, or the toxic fumes from the steel works or the teachers at St Albans, we can do anything! My Mam was Bootie Miller, we lived in Habershon St and Tweedsmuir Rd. My nana lived in Storrar Rd. I sure do miss them all.

Steve Pain of Brisbane, Australia
I was born in Rumney Street, Splott, 1950. My parents immigrated to Australia in 1956 because of my mother's asthma. My father (in Splott) would go downstairs & light the fire early to warm up the house. Then us kids would go down & put socks on our cold hands. Our gloves would be drying out from getting wet in the snow the previous day. We would make snowmen & throw snowballs. We went next door to watch 'Cisco Kid' on their TV. I remember being pushed in a pram up the road to see my older sister start grade 1. I remember going to Cardiff Castle and catching goldfish in a jar. I remember sitting on the fence in the backyard of the neighbours opposite & watching the trains go by. I would spit out the cod liver oil tablets my mother gave me. My father worked in the steel works. I remember him cooking us rice & bread puddings. My mum made Welsh Cakes. I have revisited Rumney Street & the house where I was born it had changed alot. We went straight to the mines in Mt Isa in Australia where my father had work.

Linda, Rumney, Cardiff
I remember the lady that sold the toffee dabs in Robinson Square (where I lived). She lived on her own, I think her son was away at sea. Every Friday afternoon she would stand on her front door and all us kids used to run over with our pennies - the toffee dabs were lush! She used to sell toffee apples as well.

David Thomas
My parents were living in rooms in Marion Street when my sister was born in hospital, but when it was my turn the second born could be at home. Around the 1980s my mother told me that I was born upstairs in the front bedroom of my grandparents home in Carlisle Street due to adequate facilities - Grampy was managing Boley's butchers and lived there. Gramps would ask us to go into the walk in freezer and get sausages from the back shelf. We would have to walk past the carcasses of lamb, pork, and beef and I remember how scary it was. Then suddenly the fridge door would slam shut behind us, there we were in pitch black screaming our lungs out, and he would only open the door after all the customers had split their sides with laughter - seems funny now!! Anyway, to calm us down and to stop us crying he would take us over the road to a shop and buy us an Uncle Dick's lollipop. I can tell you we had many visits to that shop! Does anyone else out there remember those parts of Carlisle Street?

Shit, Shower and Shave

This is an edit of five triptychs from the original forty two. The Idea of the project was to make pictures on a large scale in order to document the things that I saw from day-to-day, encompassing the bizarre to the mundane. I wanted to leave an air of ambiguity to many of the images as I didnt really want people to try to recognize the locations, yet just understand the happenings and seek out the greater narrative running through the series.

Red Dawn

We are now awakening from the Dawn of a global economic recession, with the harsh realities of our consumerist life styles tumbling in around us as we fall from the crest of a 12-year boom.

Through this project I have sought to give further voice to the fears of those attending the G20 protest on the 01 April 2009. Whose trust towards the Government and Banks has diminished to within a point of no return. Giving calls for there to be a dissolving of parliament and subsequent general election.
The G20 was one of the most documented Protests of the 21^st century; I have touched on this but not allowed it to dominate, showing the peaceful, animated and conflicting sides to the protest.

Easy Targets

For many years now it has been becoming more apparent to me that respect for the fire service has been dwindling. Assaults on firemen went up from 1,300 in 2006 to 1,500 in 2007 (source FBU) whilst the government tried to claim that the figure had dropped by 400 within that same period. There has also an increase in adults making hoax phone calls. This highlights how there is still a portion of the general public which links the Fire Service to positions of authority and control forgetting that they are in fact only putting them selves out to save others. Fire chiefs in the South Wales Brigade have stated that the amount is near 1,000 a year with each call out costing around £650 and potentially an untold amount of lives.

This has to stop!

I have spent the past 3 months living my life on call with the Green watch of Caerphilly fire station in order to create a series of 18 images looking into their curious work lives.
It has been my intention through this project to illustrate the extents to which those who are little recognized are working tirelessly in an effort to keep the general public out of harms way.
The portraits within this series have stripped away all of the bravado that goes with being a firefighter to leave behind a more personal insight to there personality’s, whilst the series as a whole underlines the humility and heroism of the crew.

Friendships are made whilst lives are lost, with no time to stand still or take stock.