Neil Shirreff: Curiosity, Invention and the Photograph

Curiosity, Invention and the Photograph is Neil Shirreff’s first solo show and brings together a number of series that have been made over the last eight years. His work employs experimental and innovative photographic processes including the design and production of machinery and apparatus to create his photographs.

The techniques involved, range from precision colour luminograms, modified record turntables, multiply exposures and colour LED lights. There is also a site-specific installation created purely for this exhibition.

These often complex and time-consuming techniques are designed to generate images that draw our attention to their construction, our fidelity to the photographic medium and the value assigned to a photographic image to represent a single event. At the same time, the works are designed to foster a curiosity and sense of wonder for the medium’s ability to fix light and render visible a visual world beyond reach of the human eye.

Currently that sense of wonder and excitement Shirreff holds for photography’s reactive properties has reduced all traces of realism in his images to abstraction. These projects demonstrate how, over time, Shirreff has stripped the medium to its bare essentials, and striven to innovate techniques that instil in the viewer the same curiosity and inquisitiveness he shares, for exploring the medium through its own prism.