IN SEARCH OF BOREDOM

The onset of mass production in the 20th Century has affected the psychology of the ‘individual’ and our relationship with meaning. Our naturally evolved connections with history, identity and the natural world are becoming evermore distanced from our everyday existence. People are predisposed to constantly search for meaning and I have always wanted to challenge the viewer to what they consider ‘worthy’ subject matter for photography.

The notion of the ‘generic’, the all encompassing surface of something that seeks to include everyone and simultaneously refers to no one. Places and objects that manifest the idea of the corporate environment and mass production, things that epitomise the mundanity of our office worlds and their universality and where the mass produced item is the embodiment of objectified knowledge. Their over familiarity and homogeneity detaches them from any particular associations registering them just outside the boundaries of our perception. Things that are so instantly recognisable that they are fully decoded, our monotonous, everyday experience of them renders them unremarkable. Consequently, images are paired down to their most fundamental elements, superfluous information is removed in search of purer forms and compositions creating images that take critical attention away from self expression to concentrate on materiality and functionality.

By stripping away all evidence of history, culture, identity, location, time and context, the usual indexes with which we construct meaning are being removed. The consequence of this is images that are both universal and unspecific, communicating on a fundamental level with exaggerated simplicity and an apparent freedom.

The homogenous, objective nature of the subject lends itself to minimal, more graphic pictures. They are a reaction against the noise of everyday life and a liberation from the indexes with which photography is usually filled. There are no transformations taking place, no natural evolution, no history, these locations are trapped in a perpetual present, demonstrative of routine, boredom and the daydream. They appear the same everyday, liberated from time and context, visually they are barely audible.

The viewer is left with images that are reduced to pale, indistinct colours and simple, elemental compositions. The pictures contain no extremes, everything is neutral and unchallenging. Graphic, constructed images of commonplace objects become a celebration of universality and create an unspecificity, requiring very little of the viewer, except only to embrace the emptiness and indifference and detach the mind. By trying to visualise those moments in between our experiences with meaning, the work creates a sense of peace and solitude, a limbo and mental wandering that in reality is little more than a daydream. They represent the time in-between experience as we wait for our next encounter with meaning. By their very nature, they are a void, a meditation on the experience of nothingness. An opportunity to embrace boredom, a state of mind that reminds us of how to truly be with ourselves, and that we are still, ultimately, in control of our own existence