What is a photograph?

This is the question that inspires and drives my work, subverting traditional and modern technologies and techniques to extend the vocabulary of photography and changes preconceptions of what photography is, can and will be.

For me there are only four things you need to make a photograph: light, time, a surface and an idea. The burning of the sun into your retina on a bright day... a photograph, the yellow piece of grass under a wooden board... a photograph.

I've always had a facination in finding unusual ways of capturing the photographic image, whether it's pinhole cameras with 36 lenses made out of vacuum cleaner hoses, or combining homemade linear cameras with remote control cars or creating intricate montages made out of 20 negatives and an old sweet wrapper and then contact printing them to create unique images.

In recent years I have built my own colour darkroom to give me the freedom to experiment, spending days at a time in the darkroom. Most of the time producing nothing worthwhile but every now and again discovering a new technique or way to use light to create new types of photography.

I have been looking at the usually discarded elements of negatives where stray light reacts with chemicals to produce accidental vibrant colours, textures and abstract forms. Removing them from their original meaning by reproducing them as photographic works in their own right.

Currently I am experimenting with a fibre optic 'paint (light) brush' to stroke the photo during the process of development and move different coloured light around the paper. At first this experimental technique produced many surprises but now I have mastered the use of this innovative tool to create a range of effects. The compositions are deliberate but also stimulate many unintended familar images.