Primarily using analogue materials, APPARATUS positions the camera and the operator as fused entities, where the apparatus echoes that of the state or big tech (hidden in plain sight, immovable, omnipresent) but is also a site of experimentation and potential new futures. Using techniques of disruption such as collage and re-photography, I ask: where does the apparatus end and the creative imagination begin? Where in the image can the technical and magical elements of photography collide? Beginning with an ‘interruption’ of W.H Auden’s 1939 poem ‘I am Not a Camera’, in which he cautions a world that defines experience through images, I think about photography, and by extension, light, as a collaborator and pollutant.

“Images of a female camera operator/techician (self-portraits) are reconfigured throughout the series, teasing apart how photographic representation can complicate, disguise, and refract its subject-matter. The prism appears as a motif at several points, sometimes with an eye visible through each surface. The optic splits its object, the human body, into fragments. There is something, finally, about the female body and person in this and other conceits: the ways in which the camera has played tricks with our perception of it, forced it into uncomfortable shapes. A reclamation of sorts is taking place as well as a deconstruction.” (Greg Thomas for Scottish Art News).

This series was supported by Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals and exhibited at StrangeField (Glasgow) and across the city with a collaboration with

Build Hollywood in November 2024. 

Apparatus (2024)