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This series combines original Ambrotypes, a form of portraiture once popular in Victorian Britain (1850s-1880s), with the addition of surprising and often unsettling visual elements. Such elements can be exaggerated or quietly unobtrusive to reimagine the sitter, the formal space of the studio and the pictorial conventions that tightly defined individual identity.

 

The intention is to create a fantastical space for identity in flux, for story and historical possibility that carries a sense of the Victorian Gothic, at times macabre and sardonic. 

 

Using the traditional wet collodion process, these large scale, contemporary interpretations of a historical artefact, become more filmic versions of what was once a domestic and decorative object. Here reality and fiction co-exist to create an otherworldliness that pushes at the plausible and fantastic in equal measure.