Cut Away.

2023 so far - and I am already in April - feels like a year of planning and of waiting. I’m returning to Japan for the first time in four years in October, and have mostly good feelings about it. The years I did spend there were formative of my adulthood; a process akin to the smashing down of an idealistic work of architecture, with the return home resembling the process of rebuilding something more modest and longer lasting from the rubble.

In these first months since completing the project and classroom work of MA Photo, I’ve been trying not to lose momentum. Truthfully, I haven’t achieved the single-minded state of “this is who I am and what I do” in the way I thought I might. I accept that I may never be able to function this way, as a singularly driven person who does only one thing, and becomes it. But I know the flavour of my life better now than previously, and understand that letting go of vague possibilities allows for focus on certainties.

One of my-UK based projects this year involves a long study of lithic forms and geologies in southwest Wales. As a (half) Welsh person who didn’t grow up in Wales, I find myself drawn back with ever more urgency to the land; the physical land. It’s not easy to visit over a weekend, though, and I find myself staring at the same twenty images made on the last visit, and dissociating a little with overfamiliarity. Like repeating a word over and over until it makes no sense. But this project’s momentum comes from pull, not push, and I trust the flow of it.

In the meantime, to stave off the restless non-production days, I re-printed and cut up a number of the images made in Pembrokeshire in 2022 and formed them into new-old monuments, tacking them to paper before scanning them whole.

I’m beginning to see the value in un-making elements of an image to make something to play with. Even if it’s only to hold back the madness of the thinking that comes either side of the doing.