These analogue 35mm stills document my ever-changing Stow studio. Captured with a 1984 Canon AV1, these images are an incredibly important aspect of my practice. Over exposed, or with expired film, these images document small moments, that – when taken together – illustrate not only how I work and where my ideas come from, but also the hoards of antique objects that inspire the creative process.
Wherever I've worked over the last six years (I've had studios in Edinburgh, Glasgow & Brussels; I've made work in France, Spain & Italy too) I've always returned here to Stow in the Scottish Borders to draw exhibitions and projects to a close.
“These new photographs on old film effect a curious folding of time. They have a quality of age, so that today looks like a postcard from years before. As [his] paintings enact an encounter of solid things, lodged in time and place, with endlessness and timelessness - the momentary glimpses of memory, the seascapes’ unending motion, represented on particular objects with particular histories - so the camera’s lens opens, and ‘now’ is captured on film that dates from ‘then’.
There is a motif of journeying and standing still, represented in a number of [his] photographs ... See here the warm interior of the studio, objects slant-lit, gathered in their taxonomies, bundled, piled, and at rest.”
