The Mirrored Universe

This series of playful still life photographs is meant to be evocative of the beauty and mystery of the universe and a challenge to the mind and eye of the viewer to see with fresh eyes.

In them I have returned to the studio and picked up brush, scissors, and drawing materials, incorporating hand-made work into still-life arrangements with found objects, flowers, and reflective surfaces. The tension between realism and abstraction is more pronounced than ever.

The images are very straightforward photographs: They represent what I saw when I looked through the camera viewfinder at the moment I pressed the shutter release. The distortions you see are a result of reflections in an imperfect mirror, and a result of the lenses I choose to work with.

The drawings in the photos are a daily diary of sorts, a kind of visual record of the morning (usually) and my thoughts about the other objects I am thinking about photographing that day. They are inspired by my heart and mood, by a moment of light, by nature and weather. Some of the images feature black and white or color photographs instead of a drawings, and others have drawings that have turned into sculptures during their time on the workbench. As for the other objects in the photos, they are also a daily record of sorts, collected from the house or garden, or occasionally from further afield. They are all things that caught my fancy in one way or another.

These images represent one answer to a long-standing question of mine: how to use the camera like a drawing tool and how to put that hand-made and heart-driven look into a photo. In some way these pictures make themselves, springing from my mind in bursts as I work, a process familiar to me as a painter.