Around 2002 I took a large series of photographs of the interiors of friend’s houses. None of these shots contained people, but they still recorded their lives through the traces indicated by the objects and the way they are arranged. To this extent these Still Lifes are different from traditional ones that use ‘arrangements’ for aesthetic compositional purposes rather than as (forensic) documentary. So, to refer to these with the conventional categorisation is a little misleading, they are more accurately portraits or should perhaps be called ‘still lifes’. Like the rest of my work they are about (absent) people and invite imaginative work from the viewer to fill out the documentary on the basis of their own observation and experience. A 2002 exhibition of these paintings was called ‘Private Life’.
Rhododendron
From a series of six paintings of spent Rhododendron blossom fallen
Still Life – the Breakfast Series
Each painting O/C 50 x 50 cm The Breakfast series was a record of my own breakfast every morning for a month. I hoped it would communicate the pleasure and importance of the mundane repetition and ritual of such familiar human actions as a counterpoint to our general societal disdain for intimate personal and repetitive commonalities.