The psychological terrain I choose to navigate throughout my photographic art practice is a deep reflection on my own anxiety in the face of death.

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Research over the past few years has helped me position my current practice within a history of photography that dates back to the postmortem photographs of the late 19th century. In a time of disease when mortality rates of children were high, the notion of death (and acknowledgement of its presence) was more or less a culturally accepted phenomenon. Dying (and the recording of it) was a frequent, cellular, individualized event.

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This can scarcely be said for the 21st century where it is often sporadic, invasive, displaced and impersonal, disturbingly questioning what we would otherwise consider 'death neutral' environments. Modern Western governance of health, social planning and biotechnology have meant people are less likely to be exposed to death as a physical reality within their social environments, rendering it absent and unfamiliar through means of mediation and simulation.

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My visual language thus intends to act as an autopsy on the human condition by intentionally breaching the imagined boundaries between life and death spaces – making visible the largely absent aspect of death in contemporary social environments.

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To be mortal is to be human, and I invite society to look beyond the exterior layers of self and acknowledge truths concerning mortality that they may otherwise wish to deny.