Exhibition Notes

These are nine images from a series entitled “All that Glisters is Not Gold”. The series was inspired by old sayings. It was conceived upon seeing a tiny embroidery of a woman tearing the hair out of her head – I felt instant resonance, reassurance, and a warm fellow-feeling. The recognition exerted a calming effect. That’s how it is with old sayings - you’re suddenly not alone any more “walking on eggshells”, or feeling “at the end of your rope”. You realise you’re in good company. Someone has felt that frazzled feeling before – in fact many people have. It helps to know that you’re connected.

Old sayings conjure up images in my head: the beginning middle and end get subtly jumbled, and embedded in one picture. Take the frayed rope, at the end of which we see a woman in a powder blue dress. It suggests the rough, frazzled journey she has travelled. She has had enough – she is at the end of her rope. Look closely and you’ll notice that her dress is of the same blue as the rope, and the material subtly echoes its entwined pattern.

I decided to choose simple yet rich colours, accentuating a monochromatic palette, saturated with fable-like reds and warm gold.

I wanted the meaning to sneak up catching the viewer unawares as opposed to jumping you - or hitting you over the head. I wanted them to be gentle, quiet images.

“All that glisters is not gold” sounds like it could also be a timely comment on today’s world. We could do with reconsidering some simple down to earth old-world values, some unpretentious everyday homespun wisdom that is traceable to Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”, (the line “neither a borrower nor a lender be” comes from an other play), and maybe since time immemorial.

My photographic antecedents hail back to the old world too – from Julia Margaret Cameron’s posed 19th century tableaux, Dorothy Wilding’s glamorous and sometimes quirky photographs, Dorothea Lange’s honesty, Irving Penn’s clarity to Angus McBean’s ever-so-slight touch of surrealism.