This work began during a month-long residency inside the Gibraltar Nature Reserve, where I lived and worked in exchange with wildlife biologists studying the Barbary macaques. In Gibraltar, I observed how the macaques retreat each evening from the tourist stage to the cliff, when the Natural Reserve would close it's doors to the visitors and their coveted peanuts - a nightly withdrawal that resonated with these themes of displacement. Rather than reproduce the spectacle of animals or tourists, I chose to photograph another limestone rock face at night, one illuminated by the city’s artificial light and passing headlights, as a way of showing absence and estrangement. The work is installed wall-height, sometimes split by an opening or passage, so that the image itself becomes architectural — a rupture the viewer must walk through, echoing the discontinuities and thresholds that first inspired the project.
My work with the opacity of soot and the traces of moths confronts them with devices of capture — the Platonic solid, the museum window, the flatbed A4 scanner. These lamp-sculptures that attract the moths are not innocent lanterns: they are traps, abrupt interruptions that cut sharply into our attempts at grasping. Their harshness resonates with the deeper contradictions at the heart of my work: neither geometrical reduction, nor mechanisms of cultural standardization, nor bureaucratic fixing align harmoniously with the ineffability of moths. This disharmony is precisely the point. Coexistence is never pure, rarely without friction, often shot through with violence. To live is always to intrude, to consume, to displace — whether in the violence at work in feeding, or in the inevitable crushing of an ant along the path of a walk. What the moths reveal when they spiral around an artificial light is not a moral failure, but the impossibility of seamless cohabitation. These works stage this impossibility, carrying the contradiction like one carries the hollowed interior of a bell pepper turned to bronze, its weight pressing heavy in the hand.
