WORDS (From China)

2011 - Ballarat International Photography Festival
2010 - Logan City Art Gallery

These images form the second stage in my ongoing WORDS project.  To create these works I travel to a different country and collect the favourite words of the people I meet.  Whilst in that country I then capture images to best represent the words I collect.

The words are therefore the starting point, which is somewhat a reversal of the standard practice of having a caption to describe the artwork.  Here the visual image – the photograph – is my attempt to describe the words in the caption.

This involves many levels of translation - an idea which fascinates me.  I have taken the favourite words from these people, translated them into a different language (English), then translated them again into a different medium (Photography).

This trip to China took me to the provinces of Guangdong, Qinghai, Gansu.  It was the summer of 2008, which also allowed me to witness a total solar eclipse from the Gobi Desert. 

I was also able to travel to Tibetan Semi-Autonomous Regions in Qinghai province, where the populations of villages and town were completely Tibetan – hence why half of these words from China are Tibetan.