artist's statement: the liminal (ongoing)
the liminal is an ongoing series that explores the boundary between the seen and unseen landscape (or elements thereof). These images aim to reflect an imaginative or emotional view of trees, foliage and flora: sometimes menacing, sometimes confounding, sometimes barely discernible, but always acted upon by the imagination.
Shot late at night and in complete darkness, and most often with a direct and confrontational use of flash, the depth and pattern of the subject matter becomes revealed as a singular, graphic arrangement of visual forms. Depth is frequently flattened, and focus and particular color become additives imposed later in the digital manipulation of the raw image. The results celebrate the still technically impoverished nature of the quotidian digital image as it struggles to capture focus and light in less than optimal conditions. These limitations have an unintended consequence, however. They allow the images to push beyond the boundaries of photographic representation, assuming a painterly or graphic two-dimensionality which may confound or challenge the viewer. Equally, they evoke the hand-painted Japanese photography of the late 19th century, and further hark back to the work of Anna Atkins and early botanical photography.
the liminal is a series about how we see and imagine the unseen, and reconstitute it in our minds as an emotional graphic simulacrum of the “real.”