Carbon Copy (2800 Photographs of Men and Women)

150 x 90cm, Unique (2020) Acrylic medium and photographic ash on canvas The work acts as a process of distillation, of boiling something down to its essence. Using something at its most bare, in its most primal and primitive state - the photographic as pigment, not as representation. The photographs are no longer fixed in time, instead burned, turned to ash and then brushed and affixed onto a canvas. They become stripped of their agency as imagery and simply exist as matter, as material. Deprived of the hierarchical nature of representation, they inhabit the ambivalent realm between being and non-being. They are the photograph, without the photograph.