Art work
All the work I show here are from long-form projects. Some have been going for over thirty years, some started only since January 2020. One theme is common to all: in large part I only record what light, life and love offers up.
Working in partnership, and continual awe, of what the day gives me is the core of the process. It is co-creation, and I am only a co-creator.
All images are available as archival-quality giclée prints, unframed or framed. Please contact me for prices.
The ‘Co-CREATION‘ series started with an exhibition for Panuku Auckland Development on Queens Wharf, Auckland. It has since grown to many pieces of work. All made on a copy stand, allowing petals to lie where they fall, and various debris from the garden, from my hole punch, from ink-spray bottles that work rather messily. The technical quality of the images is very high having been obtained through the extremely sharp Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 and using pixel shift technology. This means images suitable for printing to over 2m wide: they have to be seen in the flesh to be believed!
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The ‘Colour of White‘ series started with an accidental over-exposure while on holiday in Greece. In the belief that few things happen for no reason, I looked at the images instead of deleting them. I found that subjects with very limited dynamic range, very generous exposure turned the image from being about the subject to being a representation of light itself. More than twenty years later, I’m still at it.
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The ‘Steel‘ project is a record of what our steel splashback sees from its position in the kitchen. One day I noticed that it reflected the passing year – the garden, the trees and their shadows, the sun’s movement. It was usually most interesting in the late afternoon. Its changing face was a reflection of the garden, leaf growth and fall in the trees, cloudiness of the day.
(All images are rotated 90º from capture.)
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Asemic writing is an art form that uses the components of textual writing for its graphic vocabulary. The series ‘Callimages‘ are pen and ink work, some combined with photographic elements. The asemic writing itself may be undecipherable but are my poems, from my 49 Syllables series. A recent development is the combination of the asemic writing with the Co-Creation series in which the base text is the Te Reo Māori version of the Treaty of Waitangi. In these, I am trying ways of expressing the visual confusion of writing and foreign concepts may have created in the minds of those who could not read or write.
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Love your creative pictures, refreshing in this time of hard core in your face photo journalism!
Hi Richard.
Thank you. I love it when ego gets put aside and we acknowledge that we don’t create anything, but everything we do is a co-creation with life.
This is a side of your interests that I was not aware of before.
I find it exciting and satisfying.
Have you published any ‘Callimages’ ?
Thank you, Michael.
No; I haven’t. But I’m incorporating Callimage techniques in new work.
There’s a lot of potential in the asemic direction. It could impact writing in the way abstract art was a release from the shackles of the need to be representational.