Blaze is a series of photographs that recreate the imaginary world of 'Mills and Boon,' using real couples who strike a romantic pose in their own domestic environments. In this reconstruction of the climactic, romantic moment, their gestures become performance, their personal belongings become props; artifice in the simulation of a shared, manufactured dream.

The couples are caught in a space between the dream and the real......

What role do performance and simulation play in the "real" romantic moment? Are the emotions evoked by the vicarious experience of the romantic moment (during the consumption of a narrative) more "real" than the actual experience of the romantic moment?

In a world where sublime, hyperreal imagery dictates the aesthetic of dreams and the ideal; grittier, lower quality images are associated with the notion of truth and the real. A slick, professional aesthetic is deliberately fused with an 'amateur porn' aesthetic, leaving the viewer to negotiate the slippery territory between the dream and the real.

Popular romance novels address real problems and tensions in their reader's relationships, functioning as a site for the provocation and neutralisation of anxieties, fears and desires. Blaze weaves the contemporary Australian narratives of its subjects, with their real anxieties and desires, into the world of Mills and Boon……so that the mundane, utopian and ridiculous collide.