"All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
A lot of my work is about abstracting the everyday. I like to find beauty in the mundane and overlooked. I am also drawn to the chance and random actions I have limited control over. These works have evolved from several ideas and projects that I have been working on for some time.
One of my interests is language, especially as I live in a city where my native tongue is not the main language spoken. So, the language of language, if you can excuse the tortuous expression, attracts my attention. Language can be described as “beautiful, ugly, angry, aggressive, muscular, soft, pretty” among other things. These same words can be used to describe objects, artworks, and people. I am also interested in visual language - the ability of images to tell stories and convey the passage of time. Hence, the alternative name for the works I am showing is “Short Stories”.
In addition to my recent re-reading of John Berger’s seminal text, “Ways of Seeing”, another inspiration for these works is Chinese calligraphy, with its emphasis on aesthetic harmony, both in the written words and in the “presentation”. This has lead me to develop a body of work as a means of telling (an abstracted) story that is not to be viewed, or thought of, as photojournalism.
What evolved is what you see here. An attempt to tell a story, but one that I, as Berger points out, am only partly the author.
