Ambient, Aberrant uses the materiality of photomedia as a means to draw attention to ways we mediate our experiences of the 'natural' world, particularly through the lens of leisure tourism. I seek to lure the viewer with seductive imagery, yet demand a deeper engagement, urging the audience to question not only what they are looking at, but how they are looking at it.
By exposing the process and the constructed nature of my photographs/ light-based works Ambient, Aberrant calls into question the authenticity of the image, of Nature, of any mediated experience. It starts from the premise that the photographic gaze and the tourist gaze emerged at the same time (around 1840) and have been inextricably linked ever since.
My work seeks to raise questions around the artifice of sightseeing, chasing the sublime, our relationship to Nature (or what we think it is). It says something about selfie-culture, family portraits and the way we experience places through our (phone) cameras, rather than through our senses. It asks: Is our desire to travel to places of natural beauty a quest for a secular sublime? And if Nature is nothing more than a cultural construct is the quest futile? In my work, I try to explore the way in which the act of photography (and its expanded practices) mediates our experience of the Natural landscape.
