WYTCH is an ongoing (and ever evolving) project by myself - Syd. The scene above is from a film I shot on 8mm film 25 years ago. After leaving my bedsit in Birmingham behind, I went to live in a cottage in the middle of Exmoor, and received funding to make a short film.
In the years since, and with varying degrees of success, I have followed a meandering path with a passion for visual art (photography in particular), and a focus on pretty much the same theme as that film 25 years ago - attempting to fan the faint embers of magic that still smoulder in ancient woodlands, junk shops, hollow ways, oak trees, bookshops, art galleries and darkrooms.
In the 2000s I ran an art gallery called WOOM in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Situated in a disused factory, and showcasing the work of emerging artists from all over the world. In the 2010s I spent a lost (or found) decade living in a log cabin in a magical place called Luccombe Chine on the Isle of Wight, where I had a studio in the woods, experimenting with photography and painting. I became intimate with the wooded landscape around me and learned when to capture it at its most ethereal.
I spent much of 2023/24 in a darkroom, painting liquid emulsion onto antique mirrors, projecting a negative (of one of my photographs) onto the coated surface, and developing the whole mirror. Thus, effectively turning the mirror into a photograph. My exhibition ‘Light Bends in Imaginary Gardens’ held at Dimbola Museum and Galleries, featured the aforementioned mirrors.
I have spent the last six months in a studio in the tropical house at Ventnor Botanical Gardens (as artist in residence). In an attempt to go beyond the realm of witnessing the physical world with a camera, and embarking on an exploration of imagination and vision, creating large oil paintings and a surrealistic peep-show in a wardrobe. ‘Eavesdropping on the Otherworld’ is currently showing at Dimbola.
