Could you tell me about how you work with your photography?
For five years I worked on one project: The Laneway Project. During these five years I made nine bodies of work. Eight are photo series and then there's one digital video made from still photographs. Threshold is the last body of work from The Laneway Project. Laneways are narrow passages running behind houses. It's public space but very close to the intimacy of the private residence. During my time with Laneway I was conscious of the mutability of the boundaries between private and public space. I was essentially photographing boundaries such as walls, doors, gates that separate the public space of the laneway from the private space beyond.

In The Laneway project I started out focusing on the surface layer of the environments. I was concerned with the living nature of the supposedly inanimate environment. The first few series deal with this living nature and the body. In one work called Umbilicus, I was focusing on very small details in the surface almost invisible to the eye. They were punctures and protrusions in the surface of the buildings which I saw – very much like skin.

Living room was the series where I first started focusing more on space and referring to the boundaries. Previously I was partly focusing on this but more on the details in the surface. Living room is a series of self portraits in which I'm wearing a protective jumpsuit and sitting on furniture people have thrown away. That work came out of experiences I had working with the laneway. I encountered a lot of hostility working with the project. People were upset with my presence in the laneways even though it's public space. But when a garage door suddenly opens the public and private merge and the space becomes ambiguous. I was shooting this particular gate and there were some Portuguese men living in the houses near the laneway who were really mad about me being there. One day I went back to photograph and someone had painted white lines across the surface of the gate so I couldn't shoot it. This event let to the Living room series as a perfomative occupation of the public space.

All this builds up to Threshold. This work is about perception and the act of looking. The camera flattens two spatial realms onto a single plane that is part abstract colour field and part sharply focused scene, reducing the apparent separation between surface and space; outside and inside; public and private realms. I find it interesting how the the photograph represents a liminal space between reality and perception. In naming the work Threshold I was also referring to the tangible barrier which becomes less tangible in its photographic form, but is nevertheless a Threshold and as present and important as what you see through the opening. I'm interested in interrelationship between visual perception and photography.
Threshold is the resolution of the laneway series. When I look back now I see a substantial evolution in the work. Threshold combines a lot of my interests and is more layered than some of the earlier work. But at the same time these earlier works are what really enabled this evolution so they are just as important and I'll still be exhibiting them as well.

Can you reveal what you are currently working on?
I'm developing a body of work that deals with ambiguous landscapes and continues my interest with perception. I did my first pieces in Holland where I photographed on a dike. The work includes five videos and five large-scale diptychs. It's completely analogue with my previous photo work. The new work relies on the perceptual shift that takes place in the image because of the way it flattens perspective. But this work is still very much in progress.

April, 2004