FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Crippling social anxiety and a general anxiety disorder meant I didn’t have it in me to pursue these things as I should. I would spend my school days with my favourite music a constant in my ears to keep the world at bay; a shield, a veil to hide behind and ultimately, as it does, life meandered on. I was always making things, and learning how to achieve the things I had in my head. I I would make music videos - some for local artists, others for my own music. I I taught myself some animation (mostly because I wasn’t confident enough to ask other humans to be a part of things I was making) and suddenly I was in my early thirties working in admin. It took some devastating emotional trauma for me to realise that if I wanted the life I desired I had to pursue it, so I quit my permanent and pensionable position to find that path.

My inspiration comes from lots of places: personal experience, observation, music, poetry, even conversations; a turn of phrase may trigger an image in my mind, and dreams – mostly those moments between being awake and asleep. Aesthetically my influences range from dalí, Magritte, Varo, Beksinski, Giger, to Monty Python, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Michel Gondry and Storm Thorgerson. Through visual metaphor and surrealist bent, my images frequently come from a place of trauma and despair - sometimes people recognise and identify with these things because they’ve experienced or witnessed it; sometimes, much like life, it goes unnoticed. I’ve often been asked why I don’t make pretty pictures or brighter or more colourful imagery - ‘there is good in the world’, and, to me, I feel like there is plenty out there to show us the light. What I feel like I’m doing is what the artists and art I love have done for me my whole life – maybe you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, maybe you can but right now it’s not something you feel like you can move towards; what I’m saying is that I know this place and however long it takes to reach the light, you’re not alone in the dark.

Usually the concept and the image arrive as a succession of close-ups in my mind, slowing zooming out to reveal the