Selected work / Conceptual

Conceptual Photography

Everyday objects, found figures and unlikely encounters. These images bring photography together with compositing, handmade props and digital painting, from a crash-landed fly to a pear travelling through unfamiliar rooms.

Playful ideas Mannequins Travelling pear Painted bottles

A composite of giant pink flamingos among buildings on a sunlit street

Wandering Flamingos

I matched the flamingos’ shadows to the angles and lengths visible in other photographs taken that day.

01 / Playing with scale

Playful ideas

A fly headfirst in a mound of breadcrumb sand, with smoke rising and the seafront behind

Crash-Landed Fly

A crash-landed fly on a miniature beach, with breadcrumbs standing in for sand.

Potatoes arranged as a miniature landscape, with one flying above ground made from coffee granules

Jet-Propelled Potato

A flying potato above a landscape built from coffee granules, with a background painted in Procreate on an iPad.

A figure-shaped shadow appearing trapped behind a green wall above a worktable

Escape Room

I placed the shadow behind the plug so the figure appears trapped within the wall.

A giant fly facing a small human figure in a monochrome painted landscape

Fly

Only the fly is a photograph. The figure, landscape and sky were painted digitally in Procreate.

A standing woman surrounded by radiating blue and white digital brushwork

Power Stance

An original photograph developed through overpainting in Procreate, using brushes and smudge tools to build up the marks around the figure.

Cress

A miniature weather system assembled from cress, wire wool and a cotton-wool cloud.

An old green oil can positioned with its spout above a red rose

Oil Can and Rose

Reclamation yards and second-hand shops are a useful source of props. Here, an old oil can is paired with a single rose.

A coconut combined with a sailing ship’s mast and sails above a ground of coffee granules

Coconut Ship

Coffee granules stand in for earth. Sails photographed at a tall ships gala were combined with the coconut to build the vessel.

A giant houseplant placed inside a dimly lit shopping arcade

Triffid

A houseplant becomes an oversized visitor to an arcade. It was lit from above to match the intended setting, making the two photographs easier to combine.

Autumn leaves arranged as hills and trees around a digitally rippled lake

Autumn Lakes

Autumn leaves form the hills, with smaller leaves placed individually as trees. A Photoshop Clouds layer, treated with the Chrome effect and used as a displacement map, creates the water ripples.

02 / Found figures

Mannequins

Five finished images from the same series. Each caption describes one part of the shared process, from the original phone photographs to the final dodging and burning.

Mannequins 01

The source photographs for this series were taken on my phone through a shop window. I photographed the mannequins from several angles as they stood bundled together during renovations.

A mannequin looking upwards with a second head behind it, both covered in magazine textures

Mannequins 02

The texture for all five images began with a fashion magazine, shredded and pasted in random strips onto cardboard, then photographed.

Three overlapping mannequins covered in softly coloured printed fragments

Mannequins 03

I used a displacement map to make the magazine texture follow the mannequins’ contours, giving it the appearance of paper wrapped around their bodies.

A group of mannequins covered with colourful fashion-magazine textures

Mannequins 04

Duplicating the magazine layer and combining different blending modes produced the colour and texture I wanted.

A close view of a mannequin looking right with another figure behind, both covered in coloured print

Mannequins 05

Dodging and burning was part of the finish for each image, strengthening light and shade to emphasise the figures’ form.

03 / A recurring subject

The Travelling Pear

The same pear, photographed to suit the lighting of three different settings.

Two Doorways

Two LED lights were positioned to match the two open doorways, so the pear receives light from the same directions as the room.

A giant pear beside a brick building and a parked red car, with a strong shadow across the wall

Street Scene

The pear was photographed against white card with one strong light, capturing a shadow to suit the pavement and wall in the final scene.

A giant pear in a vaulted passageway, lit from an opening above and to the right

Corridor

Soft light from above and to the right matches the light falling through the opening in the corridor.

04 / Multiple processes

Camera movement and digital painting

Three bottle studies made using the same process: LED-lit photographs taken with intentional camera movement (ICM), blended in Photoshop, then cleaned up and unified with brushwork in Procreate.

Shiraz

Around 13 layers went into each image in this series. The LED-lit ICM photographs were combined in Photoshop, trying different blending modes and using masks to build the result.

Bombay

For the backlit frames, I adjusted the light’s colour to suit the bottle and its contents. The layered photographs retain the bottle’s shape while letting the surrounding colour move.

Cava

In Procreate, I painted over debris and parts of light stands at the edges, preserving the framing. A few brush strokes across the whole image helped the combined photographs feel cohesive.

Behind the photographs

Building a scene from an idea

Everyday objects and chance finds often provide the starting point. A pear, a houseplant or a group of mannequins can suggest a scene simply by changing their scale or surroundings.

Some of the materials are very ordinary: breadcrumbs for sand, coffee granules for earth, cotton wool for a cloud. The mannequin textures began as strips of a fashion magazine, pasted onto cardboard and photographed.

For composites, matching the light before combining the images makes a difference. I lit the pear and houseplant to suit their new settings, and used shadows in other photographs as a reference for the flamingos.

Photography also sits alongside drawing and painting here. The giant fly is placed in a scene painted in Procreate; Power Stance develops an existing photograph through overpainting. The bottle studies take camera movement and layered colour towards a painterly finish.

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