I was born I Cornwall in a family of artists. My father took me every weekend drawing in the landscape where we spent long hours looking mostly out to see or waiting for the light as the weather down there was always fairly brutal. Looking south from the cliffs and beaches I saw the world very much in silhouette, back lit and therefore more monotone than colour.

I took this passion for landscape with me to University in Manchester where I studied printmaking – again, black and white but in the form of etchings with rich tonal work and contrasts. I suffered badly from homesickness but Manchester with its dirt, industry and built up nature of the environment made me question whether the romantic idealism of emptiness was relevant. So I chose to look at the built environment anew, seeing the potential of rigid structures and harder edges to my imagery. My etchings deal with the toughness of industry but incorporated washing lines which replaced the form of clouds.

As I have got older and moved to my home town of Northwich, Photography has taken over as my main media of choice. But now the combination of man and nature collide due to the environment which surrounds me. Northwich was and to an extent still is a thriving chemical town, but although there are still significant signs of its history, the trees, fields and rivers have begun to dominate the scenery once more. Pipes and valves peep out from fields, steam emerges from undergrowth, factory chimneys peer over the treetops.

My photographs deal mostly with the local area in which I live, they aim to indicate the sense of an uneasy alliance between mess and clean, man and nature, natural and artifice. The beauty of emptiness and the power of complication. My pictures are busy, complex yet attempt to look for structure to create control. They are all about light and the lack of it. The time of the day, the month of the year. I enjoy looking for structures which create dynamics, throwing one’s eyes around the page, compositionally complicated.

I love confrontations, subterfuge, cloaking and conflict in what I choose to photograph.