I am an artist working in photography and video. My photographs often take the form of sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled and re-photographed as new images. My videos similarly combine existing images from photographic history and from a personal archive to remix and re-present familiar imagery. I strive to situate an individual approach within the shared visual codes of popular culture.

My work over the past few years has been dedicated to unraveling the power structures embedded in everyday objects and in the conventions of representation. I strive to situate an individual, personal approach within the shared visual codes of popular culture. I think a lot about being overwhelmed by images, being unable to escape them, and about experiencing the world through them. Many of my earliest photographic projects work from archival images to consider how design and popular imagery work on our psyches, and how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness. I look at the way that images shift, accumulate, endure and change in meaning and value as they age, and the effect this has on a collective worldview.

Recently, I have focused increasingly on video work to explore the medium’s narrative potential. My most recent video, Glass Life, 2021, a six-channel video installation recently on view at ICA Los Angeles, considers the internet as an archive that can be controlled and organized to fit individual notions of what is true and real.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
The manifesto beautifully describes the feeling of living in a crumbling world where truth is slippery, where it becomes more and more difficult to grasp any particular image or idea, to form a self against an endless wash of images and information, or to know what is “real”. My work engages deeply with these issues. The video I propose to make works through ideas around algorithmic bias, the way that new technologies that seem “neutral” reproduce old biases, the way that truth gets constructed and solidified through images that we cannot trust, with material consequences in the real world. I will also consider AI as it turbocharges the difficulty of pinning down images. The project is a contemporary revisiting of Aby Warburg’s 1920’s Mnemosyne Atlas project – also made during a divisive time in history, which explored how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power solidified some ideas as important or true while discarding others.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
An immersive video formed from an alphabetical index of 68 words pulled from the media at this tumultuous moment in history. The words, pulled through the algorithms generated by my online activity, include personal terms and terms of more universal concern, combining individual experience with a shared public version. Each term will be illustrated with corresponding images to make one expansive final encyclopedic video work that reflects how popular images work to establish contemporary truths.

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