Biography
I'm based in the UK and have been taking photographs since 2010 — for a long time, that was my only way of looking at things. The drawings came later, during the COVID lockdowns: stuck indoors, I started teaching myself to work in pencil and ink. The ink gave me a way to render those same subjects in an entirely different language.
I keep coming back to a handful of obsessions — ruined churches and forgotten chapels, and when I started picking up graphic novels the obsession turned to vampires and the restless dead, anatomical and vanitas studies. I've always loved history, and I spend as much time as I can reading about it and walking around National Trust and English Heritage sites. I've also done a fair bit of urban exploration — some of the most interesting time I've spent with decay has been inside abandoned places the world has long since walked away from. Many of the chapels and chambers in these drawings are places I've actually stood in. They are the things that won't leave the edges of my vision; sooner or later I have to draw them out of it.
Each drawing is worked in pen and ink, sometimes pencil, on paper I age by hand with tea and coffee washes until it carries the warmth and weight of something a hundred years old — less a new drawing than a leaf torn from a book that has survived more than it should have.
Memento mori — “remember that you must die” — isn't morbid here, it's attention. The Victorians understood something we've quietly agreed to forget: that underneath everything, we are temporary structures, elegant and intricate and perishable. These drawings are an attempt to look at that without flinching, and to find it beautiful.