Insecurity (1995-2005) examined the global phenomenon of privatised global security, utilising this modern hyper-industry as an allegory for analysing global insecurity. Summer Camp was photographed in the summer of 2001 at a secretive training camp in Eastern Europe that was part of the private military and security industry. At the end of that summer the Sept 11th attacks occurred and the private security industry expanded rapidly. Kill House (2005) is a photographic navigation through a US based military structure used for the training of private military personnel prior to deployment to domestic and foreign conflicts and was photographed at the height of the war on terror. The Vigilance System (2008) is a series of photographs taken along the route of the then newly opened 300 million euro External Integrated Vigilance System on the southern Andalucian coast in Spain. The system is porous and undefined in any conventional sense, consisting of an amalgam of satellite technology, surveillance stations and human personnel. The images, against the backdrop of the Global Financial Crash and the war on terror, are fragments and document a system that may or may not be visible or even there at all. As such, the images capture all the activity of this region, without hierarchy, tourism, industry, security. Surveillance is normal. Surveillance is embedded. Surveillance is boring. The Colony (2010-2016) is a companion piece to The Vigilance System and is the second part of a border series of work and takes the idea of the Pacific Century as its starting point. The flora and fauna, battleships, aerial patrols and the nightly phenomenon of bat colonies migrating across Australian skies in Sydney allude to environmental displacement, migration and the increasing perception of threat in the Pacific region. Swarm is a moving image piece about aerial rehearsal and how very slowly the sky becomes crowded with the technology of conflict, until the crescendo is reached and we are once more left with silence. Bomblast are the safety protection curtains installed in many government departments in the wake of multiple IRA bombing campaigns in London and whose continued installation in those spaces reflects the ongoing threat and fear of terrorist attack. The images are recreated, as CGI constructs, from my memories of working in a government department and being inside looking out at the world outside through these filters that suggest both the domestic as well as the potential for extreme violence. Constellations is a nine minute montage film produced in collaboration with Esther Teichmann from A Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Award in relationship to The Human Cell Atlas.
My work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, Open Eye in Liverpool, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art in Norwich, and Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland. I have work held in public and private collections including the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Martin Z. Margulies collection in Miami. Work is featured in published surveys including the Thames and Hudson World of Art series The Photograph as Contemporary Art, 100 European Photographers, EXIT, Madrid, the Focal Press publication Langford’s Basic Photography and magazines and journals such as Source and Portfolio.
Curatorial projects include Staging Disorder, including an accompanying publication (both with Esther Teichmann) for University of the Arts London and Infraliminal for Stills Gallery in Edinburgh.
I have been the recipient of awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council of England and The Australia Council. From 2016 to 2020 I was Director of Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and was previously Associate Professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Technology Sydney and Programme Director for Photography, Moving Image & Sound at the University of Brighton. I currently teach part-time at University of the Arts London whilst undertaking a Wellcome Trust funded project with colleagues at the Royal College of Art in London.
I completed my undergraduate studies at the Polytechnic of Central London and at West Surrey College of Art & Design, Farnham and completed an MA at the Royal College of Art and a PhD in the Faculty of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.