Statement, July 2009.

A statement written for the Degree Show catalogue:

My practice is based on walking, that is, walking as a fundamentally creative spatial practice – a process of experience and documentation that produces narratives. The word ‘psychogeography’ is a useful term in describing this practice, in that it is concerned, primarily, with experiences of urban and suburban environments – I am fascinated by buildings, public spaces, monuments, and how memory and narrative become manifest in physical spaces. The work is informed, creatively and theoretically, by a number of spatial practices that can all be described as, or have some aspect that is, psychogeographical.

This body of work presents an experience of an urban environment. It is in many ways an exercise and experiment in shifting perceptions of the city. However, the work does not seek to politicise (although there are political aspects), nor to present a particular message (although there messages buried within the work). This is not what concerns me here. Instead the work seeks to question, and in turn, to open up new ways of experiencing urban environments. It is here that the practices gathered under the term psychogeography are most relevant, as it is psychogeography that symbolically transforms our everyday experiences of these urban spaces.

In short the work is a direct response to the built environment - the photographs compose themselves, texts written by semiotic stimulus. Through the creation of disjunctions and discordance within the work, just as in the changing of our reasons for movement through the city, our perceptions of the representations of these spaces can be changed.