I make pictures that express my fascination and curiosity about our world, from wild unpeopled sea and landscapes, to human influenced and altered places, and the living things inhabiting this earth. I am endlessly inquisitive about the natural world and human nature. The ecological, geological, meteorological and psychological are all subjects of wonderment. I’m interested in deep time, deep ecology, art, history, science fiction, fantasy and mythology. I am intrigued with notions of time as a subjective abstraction, and how I may use my camera to either freeze a single moment or blend a succession of them into blurs of motion. I spend hours gazing at the sea. Or hiding, waiting for wildlife to appear. I’ve climbed snow-covered hills in search of mountain hare, and danced joyfully with my camera in a pas de deux with the tide. Ultimately and inevitably, I return to an enduring love affair with the sea and an expressive desire to transform time and light into moments of beauty to be enjoyed as printed works of art.
I was born in Australia of Scottish-Irish parents and grew up with the strong, loving influence of my English stepmother. Despite living in Australia’s landlocked capital Canberra, the call of the ocean loomed large in my consciousness. In my twenties I fell into a job focusing on ecologically sustainable fishing that became a 30+ year career and brought me to live in the UK in 2000. Post-graduate curiosities led me to applied science in fisheries management, executive coaching, and eventually to a Masters in Behavioural Sciences. In my consulting practice, established in 2005, I worked on sustainable fisheries and organisational development projects, and I’ve spent over a decade helping create, then grow, a certification system for gender and intersectional equity in the workplace. Yet it was a need to scratch an insistent artistic itch that drew me to photography.
My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic, a 14th birthday present. In my early twenties I got hold of a 35mm film SLR and then a series of digital SLRs from about 2006, and have now gone mirrorless. In the last four decades I have dabbled in b&w in the darkroom, been an avid vacation snapper and a bit of a paparazzo with my long lens at social gatherings. I loved picture-making, but thought of it as taking notes on life rather than a means of artistic self-expression.
In 2018 I decided to consciously develop my photographic skills, so I sought out masters of the art and spent time in the Scottish Highlands with guides and on workshops making pictures of Scotland’s wildlife. I read books about photography, acquired monographs by incredible photographic artists, and consumed countless YouTube videos about landscape, seascape and nature photography. I did one-to-one workshops by the sea and in the woods. I resolved to develop my own creative perspective, my artistic voice, if you will. To that end, I sought out accomplished fine art photographers from whom to learn, and spent some long, wonderfully tiring days in Pembrokeshire and in the Scottish Highlands being guided and inspired by David Ward. Between 2020 and 2023, I had the honour and privilege to be mentored by the hugely inspiring, internationally renowned fine art, ocean specialist Rachael Talibart. These experiences stretched my creative vision and continue to feed a strong desire to make expressive, evocative art using my camera as paintbrush and light as paint.
So far, my work is in private collections in London, Penzance, Canberra, Brisbane, and Zurich.
Selected Awards
Transient Beauty, Highly Commended in 2023 Landscape Photographer of the Year
Selected Exhibitions
TRANSIENT BEAUTY >> Landscape Photographer of the Year 2023 Travelling Exhibition. Tour dates:
Paddington Station, London – 20th November 2023 to 7th January 2024
Liverpool Lime Street – 8th January 2024 to 19th January 2024
Manchester Piccadilly – 20th January 2024 to 3rd February 2024
Glasgow Central Station – 5th February 2024 to 18th February 2024
Edinburgh Waverley Station – 19th February 2024 to 4th March 2024
Leeds Station – 5th March 2024 to 23rd March 2024
London Bridge Station – 24th March 2024 to 13th April 2024
Waterloo Station, London – 14th April 2024 to 4th May 2024
DARK MATTER >> Roffey Park Institute, Forest Road, Horsham, UK >> 6 January - 5 March 2023
Selected Publications
Landscape Photographer of the Year: Collection 16, October 2023, Ilex Publishing
Outdoor Photography Magazine, October 2023, Issue 298, Runner Up, One Thing This Month…Coastal Landscapes
Len’s Journal, Volume 3 Issue 3, August 2023, Dark Matter series
Outdoor Photography Magazine, January 2023, Issue 290, Exhibitions
Outdoor Photography Magazine, March 2020, Issue 254, One Thing This Month…Wildlife Behaviour
Explore my work, contact me to enquire about prints:
I proudly support the ethos of You+2 - an initiative by photographers to do something about plastics pollution by the ocean.
