Minimal Works, 2016-2022

I first encountered Minimalism through the works of Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Yves Klein and Lewis Baltz whilst I was studying in art college in 2013. In 2014-17, I was at university and focusing on my degree, but I felt adrift, without a clear direction in my work after several failures and false starts. In response to this I decided to set-out in exploration of Minimalism’s philosophy of simplicity and precise use of limited visual information in a bold attempt to channel this through photography, and find an answer to my creative predicament. I made my first initial pictures in 2016. In the succeeding years I was photographing carparks, lido pools, tennis courts, walls and at one point a crazy golf course. When I started making works in this series, I saw them as images of obstruction; because these places have been removed from their context and therefore contradict what photography claims to be; a depiction truth. A carpark space, a patch of astroturf, a tennis court or corrugated panel lends perspective to the traces of life that has passed through its spatial plane. These images can be read as abstract or constructivist compositions in the style of 20th century artists who came before me, if it were not for the sterile perfection that characterises the works in their eerily static state; or perhaps as a deeper statement about the falsehoods that exist within photography. These pictures feature no people, no natural environment and are devoid of human emotion and this perceived objectivity is what makes them most revealing and cunningly concealing. I concluded this series in 2022; but there is a lingering feeling of incompletion, a sense of open-endedness and precariousness that conveys the stresses and strains still affecting my practice today.