On Re: Series:

Re: Series (2007-09) explores photographic looking and perception within the genre of 'landscape'.

Working with mirrors taken to typological English woods, fields, rivers and coastlines, a shooting process was developed where briefly glimpsed compositions were caught in-camera. The process required a letting-go of pre-conceived ways of seeing, utilising the glimpse or glance rather than the long-held gaze. The resulting pseudo-landscapes contain subtle linear interventions, or more pronounced disturbances that complicate the internal logic of the pictorial space.

The use of mirrors in the work stems from the photograph and the mirror's parallel properties as tools of representation. Much like the mirror, the material surface of the photograph is visually bypassed to the image ‘below’. In Re: Series, to overcome this, the mirror is relocated to the internal world of the image in an attempt to make the transparent tangible.

Found within most of the images, is the shearing and smearing of the beveled edge of the mirrors which runs counter to the traditional hard edge of photographs. This references and brings into the centre, the usually cropped-away indistinct edges of raw images when formed by lenses, as well as alluding to the peripheral vision of the human eye. This slippage area acts as an optical marker between the parts of the image that are reflected and those that are not, hinting that the images are not as they first appear.

Despite the various interventions, these images still connect with a long-standing Western landscape tradition. In this sense they are a rogue kind of picturesque; being reminiscent of prior images but also referencing the reciprocal relationship between painting and photography. The picturesque however has a fraught status today, torn between attempting to carry beauty and the ideologies of power, national identity and the cultural construction of nature. The images set out to underline this, offering variants of the beautiful impaired by dislocated links to its referents.

Extended appropriations have been made to the archetypical modes of display and framing of the images in Re: Series. Methodologies have included mirror cladding the traditional contemporary box frame, face mounting to glass with exploded box frame and mounting to aluminium, bending along the mirror’s plane.