In my artistic practice I am constantly in pursuit of the aesthetic strangeness found lurking on the boundary between culture and nature. I create forms and images which do not fit comfortably into either category, and so reveal something about humankind’s struggle with nature as it attempts to assert the dominance of science. Mindful of Kant’s assertion that “art can only be termed beautiful” when it has “the appearance of nature”, I produce work that may not look like, or even represent natural forms, but rather deceives us into thinking that it is a self-subsisting essence, that it has arisen out of some natural power rather than having been constructed. Reflecting on the conquest of the ‘naked’ eye by advertising, my short films look to challenge habituated forms of viewing, celebrating the strange properties of movement which the camera reveals in slow motion. Interested in the unquantifiable properties of growth, I manipulate in my moving images both color and contrast in a manner which suggests a partiality of vision, and hints at the presence of a mysterious, perhaps sinister, essence driving the movements that are shown. With direct experience of nature at a premium my engagement with the digital manipulation of film is also in some way an ironical reflection upon the way culture inscribes its nostalgic view of what is beyond it in the digital age. Our fantasies of escape from mundane urban reality into the natural world have ironically produced an industry which superimposes the values of its digitally manipulative advertising over ordinary people’s aesthetic experience of nature. As much as I am interested in this process, my work also pursues the boundary between culture and nature mindful of the animistic world view that we see in antique cultures, when people held fast to their belief the the spirits of trees and cats would enact vengeance upon those who disrespected the laws of the natural world. While my work explores the new realms of meaning opened up by the world of digital media, it is also coloured with a nostalgia for the ancient reverences which still leave their traces in the present day.