In plain sight

The pervasive nature of light, entering our everyday spaces to create ephemeral moments of beauty, is at the core of my artistic inquiry. Centrally, my work asks how can a lens-based art practice that reveals everyday encounters with light, challenge the speed of contemporary visual consumption, shifting focus instead to slow-looking, perception and the act of seeing?

More broadly, my work examines the aesthetics of the everyday and how the time we spend looking affects how we perceive quotidian phenomena. The argument here is twofold. Firstly, these ephemeral encounters with light that often hide in plain sight are imbued with aesthetic qualities and can be given agency through art practice. Secondly, capturing these fleeting moments can disrupt the pace of visual consumption and shift the focus away from traditional ideas of subject matter to perception and the act of seeing.

The project’s core theme and methodology are slowing down–both for me as an artist and for the viewer alike. The accelerated pace at which we consume visual stimuli, a symptom of technology and late capitalism, leaves little time for contemplation or critical thinking. Slow-looking is more than a methodology; it is a philosophy of engagement. It is a call to subvert our cursory interactions with our environments and engage in more meaningful observation.

By slowing down, observing, and documenting how light permeates and interacts with my immediate environment, I draw attention to the typically overlooked and ordinary fleeting moments of everyday life. I am interested in exploring the perceptual experience of how we look rather than what we are looking at. By examining the visceral experience of looking at something, or nothing, for prolonged periods of time, the work aims to disrupt traditional views about subject matter, shifting instead to perception and the act of seeing.