For the last few years I have been interested in creating site specific works that address environmental issues and sustainability.

With the advent of digitisation and the passing of ‘peak camera’, I’ve produced a series of photographs seeking to reaffirm the lasting power of the photographic image. In a world where present quantity seems the enemy of historic quality, the work asks if photography’s ubiquity has threatened its fixity as art? When chiaroscuro is but one of myriad digital effects, when erasure is built into the host platform’s algorithm, does the image sustain value beyond the experience of its capture?

As a photographer whose art practice has been heavily influenced by the work of the Old Masters, I recently travelled to Venice to immerse myself in its rich history of Art.

I was interested in creating a series that investigates the influence of the works of the Old Masters on contemporary art, and how this history has affected the value of photography’s digital expression.

The project continues my interpretative response to the Old Masters, whose 500 year old skills reflect expression and preservation, but enlists landscape elements to explore notions of permanence within contemporary digital photography. By placing the classically familiar figure in a threatened environment, the work questions what constitutes lasting value in art making, and whether contemporary photography risks its legacy as lasting cultural artefact?

In 2019 I travelled with my daughter to Iceland to begin this project, to capture the precarious nature of the landscape, and to comment on the fragility of the environment (threatened by climate change) versus the potential decay of the modern digital photograph.

Having been awarded an artist residency in Venice this year, I was able to further explore the concept of cultural erasure in environments of existential threat. The shifting landscape of Venice powerfully represents photography’s tectonic shift from analogue to digital, forming new alloys and new ways of seeing.