Seats for thoughts

In 2008 I began a project where I began photographing artefacts which had been created by art students themed around known artists from a wide field of creative disciplines from painting and sculpture to music, film and beyond whilst taking the form of a chair.


I began by photographing some 40 works in the studio first as objects, then selecting 10, I lit and composed them as I would a portrait of a living person. 


After this process had been accomplished I reduced my selection  to those which I felt had the most tangible of identities, two were inspired by Francis Bacon and one by the Op-Artist Bridget Riley.

These three pieces had quite different practical approaches to sculptural forms of deconstruction, construction and adaptation.

For the final stage in the process to synthesise the nature of these pieces, I took away from the studio and photographed them as objects in the landscape, adding narration to their identity again as with a portrait for editorial or gallery.

It was evident to me that the chairs had a life of their own, containing the personality of the student who conceived them, their interpretation of their chosen artist persona, and my own personality in the composition that came out of it all.

My taste for the dramatic and melancholic were informed by my knowledge and experiences of the two Artists about which the chairs were made, understood as having very distinct approaches, so far apart they were like a foreign language to each other yet equally as bold in their application. My compositions were informed by photographers who had portrayed those same artists in life such as Bill Brand and Arnold Newman.