While the feel an image conveys, is what really matters, the exploration of new tools and techniques is also I believe the remit of an artist and digital imaging is a progression of my visual art work over the past eleven years.  While enjoying the medium of painting I find the fact that lens based images originate in ‘reality’ when a photon of light is reflected back on to the sensitive medium makes me especially interested. 

Over the years I have explored monochrome work on paper but am currently passionate about exploring colour digital images output on an ink jet printer with special archival inks, on to a variety of surfaces.  I use the moving image as my ‘sketchbook’ where I gather my experimental material and then transform it using a little known part of digital software called ‘visual stitching’ where I can repeat and join ‘invisibly’ but in so doing create a ‘new’ area at the interface – that’s a really intriguing reality.  This exploration began in 2000 when I was privileged to be one of just 1000 artists nationally commissioned to make work for The Year of the Artist which was one of the national millennium projects.  That banner-sized work went on to be shown at the International Modern Pentathlon Games as art work over the Olympic swimming pool and was seen all over the work via satellite television!

My own evolution from, though not discarding, science, to artist, has by choice followed the evolution of both. All these works celebrate the extension of human existence, the extended phenotype, brought about by handing down from generation to generation our accumulated knowledge and use of tools.

• The Wasps Ballad, is a sensual journey in my back garden, offset against images from the remarkable Eden project, with a few fireworks from Bridgwater thrown in for good measure. Apples and wasps are wonderful – but so are architecture and fireworks!

• The Primrose Way started with my yearly gasps of wonderment at spring primroses in the Quantocks where I live, topped with a snap made by agents on the international space station and appropriated via the internet. Now we can DNA fingerprint Primroses and the men that can build and operate cameras, computers and space ships. Even primroses and men contain common genes, it strikes me that evolution of man in less than 200 years (Photography was “discovered” about 1820) is just as, if not more, amazing, than the millions of years of the blind natural selection of life.

• The Biochemistry of Butterflies is based on chaos theory. The tornado in Japan and Biochemic pathways are just as probable results of the fluttering of a butterflies wing in the Amazon jungle, now all that remains is to find out which one and when!