“DOG”

“DOG” is an intentionally erratic collection of small photographic images which are printed and mounted into a number of sketchbooks. The images are cut by hand from larger sheets of photographic paper, so the edges show natural variation. Many have incidental scratches, fingerprints and other imperfections which are a result of the slow creative decision making process and should be seen as part of the piece. A number of pieces originally produced for “DOG” become catalysts for other projects.

“DOG” and Woods are conceptually very similar projects but with different processes - Woods is made of wood, paint, ink and photographs, and “DOG” is a collection of photographs mounted into sketchbooks. The photographs are removed from the sketchbooks for exhibition purposes, and arranged in vitrines.

The project is about “identity” in the very broadest, human-animal wide sense. How can a collection of babbling thoughts coming from some unknown realm called consciousness be the bedrock of what we call a person? The more I try to creatively drill into it, the more absurd the notion of personal identity as we generally think of it appears to me.

I regard each piece as a ‘“thought bubble”. Objects and thoughts become the same thing. The photographs in “DOG” often appear barely related to each other, like the bubbles of thought that glide through our heads, rarely examined as more than simply a sense of experiencing the world and reacting to it. The individual pieces are in some ways stand-ins for thoughts as they occur, before they fade from existence as mysteriously and unceremoniously as they appeared. I’m not making them because the transient thought bubbles by themselves are of paramount importance, but because the fact that they exist at all warrants investigation, and the nature of their separateness from each other is peculiar to me. There is a strange, disinterested glue that binds them and I’m trying to work out what kind of glue it is.