Some works answer questions.
Others teach you how to ask better ones.
Entheogens belongs to the second category.
Originally, it wasn’t conceived as an artwork at all. It began as visual material for a live audiovisual performance—a companion to an album I was creating with the band I performed in at the time. The music was dense, distorted and relentless, and I wanted visuals that behaved in much the same way. High contrast. Black and white. Constantly shifting. Less illustration than atmosphere.
What stayed with me wasn’t the work itself. It was the process that produced it.
The source material came from my own CT scans and X-rays. Watching those medical images move through the body fascinated me. They possessed a strange visual rhythm: recognisable for only a moment before dissolving into something abstract. Rather than preserving that imagery, I became interested in how far it could be transformed before any trace of its origin disappeared.
The footage passed through programme after programme, exported, re-imported, distorted and rebuilt. Sometimes an experiment would collapse into noise. Sometimes it revealed an unexpected texture worth following. I lost count of how many times the material was reprocessed because counting stopped mattering. The work wasn’t progressing towards a predetermined image. It was progressing through curiosity.
That distinction quietly changed the way I worked.
Until then, I had often approached making with an outcome in mind. Entheogens taught me something different. Experimentation didn’t have to justify itself by producing a finished piece. Experimentation was the research. The artwork might emerge from it later—or not at all.
When the time came to prepare my first solo exhibition, I returned to the video and found myself pausing on individual frames. Removed from movement, they possessed a different kind of presence. They no longer felt like fragments of a film. They stood independently as abstract images.
In hindsight, this was probably the most significant discovery the project gave me.
Rather than treating video as the finished artwork, I began treating it as a place to excavate images. The moving work became a landscape to explore frame by frame, searching for moments that existed for only a fraction of a second yet carried enough weight to exist on their own. It was the beginning of a process that would continue throughout much of my practice.
Looking back, I realise this was also the beginning of separating making from editing. Rather than deciding in the moment what was successful, I started allowing time to pass before returning with fresh eyes. Distance became part of the process. Images revealed themselves differently once memory had softened the excitement of making them.
The transformation didn’t stop there.
Each selected frame was projected at a large scale and photographed again before printing. Originally, this solved a practical problem, producing files large enough for exhibition. But the projection introduced something I hadn’t anticipated. Pixels, lens characteristics and sensor interference generated subtle moiré patterns and new surface textures that became embedded within the image itself. What began as a technical compromise became another stage of authorship.
The final prints were produced on illuminated lightboxes using dense latex inks chosen specifically because they absorbed rather than transmitted light. The goal was simple: wherever the image became black, the light would disappear entirely. The lightbox ceased to be a display device and instead became part of the image’s material construction.
By the exhibition, visitors rarely asked what the images represented.
Instead, they told me what they saw.
Architecture.
Faces.
Landscapes.
Cells.
Machines.
Every interpretation was different.
At first, I wondered whether I needed to explain the work more clearly. Eventually, I realised the opposite was true. The images weren’t waiting for a correct reading. Their openness was part of their strength. Viewers weren’t decoding the work; they were completing it through their own perception.
That response also changed how I thought about abstraction.
I had originally arranged the works in a long sequence, echoing the strip of film from which they came. A friend observed that, without explanation, they no longer read as video at all. They simply existed as images. It was such an obvious observation that I had overlooked it myself. I stopped feeling the need to anchor them to their origin.
Now I see Entheogens less as a finished body of work and more as the point where a methodology emerged.
Many of the processes that continue to shape my practice first appeared here: allowing experiments to unfold without predetermined outcomes, returning to work after time had passed, discovering rather than designing images, embracing technical artefacts as material, and accepting audience interpretation as part of the work’s evolution.
The images remain fixed.
The methodology continues to evolve.
The questions remain open.
Artist Archive
002
Entheogen Vignettes
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Published
September 2026