Although I have spent much time recently working on collaborative projects, my own self-directed work has continued in the background. It can be difficult at times to separate my thought processes from collaboration to self-directed and back again.

There are 3 parts or themes to my most recent self-directed work. In the first I explore an earlier idea where I placed a child on an impossibly high cliff edge and experimented with replacing cliff edge with a graphical representation. I looked at different ways to express the closeness of sudden death through height and through usding an expression of height to consider this empty space in relation to the liminal. As I worked on these I found that I was questioning how relevant this set was to the liminal and how I expressed my creative idea in the words I choose above or visually. This echoes back to some thoughts I had in collaborative works about use of the written word.  The two images I use for this set show a castle in East Lothian which I had visited with my daughter and an image I captured out of the window of daughter’s room in hospital. Making these more personal and having more reason behind my choice of image changed the feel of these works for me.

My next series is a complex work which uses some photographs I took at a concert in Glasgow of the crowd all looking in one direction, their attention on the stage. I have mixed these images with the broken ground and dirty water again from my own photographs and at same time created echoes of light and strange counter images of the figures to convey idea that what we are looking at is not something in the here and now. I am trying to communicate the surge of people heading in one direction into the unknown, almost as a homogenous mass shorn of individuality. As I say this a complex work and I am not yet satisfied with these. I feel that my visual presentation isn’t quite where I want it to be although I am happier with my broad idea.

In my third series I wondered if I could create a sense of the infinite from images of the land and the sea using huge over-exposure to create white space. These have a different feel from many of my images in that I have not used layers in these images but I find them very satisfying. I have created a sense of something just out of sight and incapable of being fully grasped which matches my sense of what lies beyond the shore of the River Styx. The third of these images uses a corruption of a telegraph pole and cables to create an otherwordly image. This feels less successful to me than my first two attempts.