A Paradox in Communication

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Labels are designed to clarify, identify and organise. They provide information, establish order and help us navigate the spaces around us. Yet in this work, these familiar mechanisms of communication become disruptive. Photographs of office and institutional environments are physically fragmented through the removal, repetition and repositioning of labels, creating gaps, seams, interruptions and moments of visual uncertainty.

The original photographs document spaces shaped by systems: places where information is filed, categorised, displayed and controlled. By physically moving the sticky labels I have disrupted that sense of order. Sections no longer align seamlessly; familiar details become obscured; information is partially concealed or displaced. What was once functional becomes ambiguous.

Clips, and office hanging mechanisms, ordinary tools associated with organising paperwork, are deliberately exposed in the hung stilllife. They no longer sit quietly behind the process but become part of the visual language of the work. They hold the photographs together while simultaneously drawing attention to their fragmentation. 

There is a contradiction at the heart of the work: the more we attempt to organise information, the more complicated its interpretation can become. A label can identify, but it can also restrict; a system can create clarity, but it can also determine what is noticed, what is hidden and how something is understood.

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My resulting images occupy an uneasy space between order and disorder, communication and silence, information and absence. They remain recognisable, but their meaning is interrupted.

The photograph becomes not simply a record of a place, but a physical object that has itself experienced interference.

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Here, communication is not lost, it is fractured. Meaning exists somewhere between what is presented, what is concealed and what we are left to interpret.