My work is an attempt to build a bridge between my head and my heart.

Perhaps it is better to say many bridges as the attempts never entirely succeed but nevertheless provide the vantage points from which investigate and express the divide.

Over the last seven years I have been gradually developing a practice that involves the use of text and image. I am interested in how these two forms of representation enforce and displace meaning and how a space can be opened up between them where meaning is more fluid.

The concerns around which my work is based have remained constant: questions of identity desire, freedom and difference predominate. I am interested in how we are constructed as human beings - by biology, society and circumstance - but also in the cultural activities people pursue. Further, in what we took to and re-fashion. As individuals in terms of constructing ourselves.

Marie Claire RIP is a series of twelve images. These are based on an article published in Marie Claire in 2002, which featured police mug-shots of a woman taken over a fourteen year period. The images were used as an anti-advert for heroin and the article revealed that not long after the last picture was taken the woman was found dead.

Mane Claire RlP is a re-staging of these images using myself as subject. This piece was motivated by a desire to memorialise an unnamed person, a woman who had already died and had no control over the use of her own image. I wanted to give her a name and through the text titles to suggest more to a life than can be summed up by 12 images. At the same time I intended the piece to be non-specific in terms of the nature of the characters demise. There is no direct reference to heroin addiction. The series may be read in terms of each person's story or experience who views it. While the piece challenges the veracity of the photographic portrait it also finds an authenticity in a notion of self-portraiture that involves acting.

It is me and it isn't her and yet it is her and it isn't me at the same time.