Artist Statement
For the past 30 years I have worked in experimental abstract photography; including making large-scale, mural size prints, layering multiple negatives, and printing these and solarizing prints in the darkroom. My current photogram work, begun in 2008, continues this investigation of the medium, offering further discoveries beyond the traditional mechanics of the camera-made image.
Although I use the materials of photography, photo paper, chemistry and an enlarger, my work is closely aligned to historical and current work in abstraction, specifically to Minimalism, in painting, sculpture and drawing. In creating these minimally determined images, I consider the elements of art; form, line, and space and the poetics of such. The photograms occupy a suggestive space between photography, drawing, and sculpture. My process is an instinctive one, based upon chance and coincidence, yet carried by the specific surface quality and formal compositions of my images.
In conceptualizing the photographic work, I make multiple small sketches in a notebook, which help me, through their different iterations, to explore formal possibilities. These drawings have been a part of my conceptual process, yet in the past they were not made for exhibition.
In 2018, I decided to further elaborate these small sketches, and so began to make drawings on 100% rag, Stonehenge paper, using pencils, erasers and stencils. In the drawings, I set a goal of making abstract images that develop the ideas that I have long focused on photographically; the grid, depth and shadow, movement and stasis.