Refluent Hours is a series of photographs exploring the darker mental states and emotions of the human psyche, examining the emotion created by placing the subject in an ambiguous physical/mental space.

The figures exist in austere physical space but because of their deeply expressed emotions each surrounding becomes a mental landscape. Emotional intimacy can be created through both landscapes and portraits; the juxtaposition of images suggests as much human emotion in the landscapes as in the surrounding human figures; there is a continuation of human emotion through each triptych.

The work is made up of 21 photographs divided into seven triptychs. By placing portraits besides images of landscape and surroundings the study of character and subject is extended to and fused with natural or physical space, enhancing the underlying tension between the exterior world and the inner world of emotion that structure the ambiguous environment of the characters.

The series plays on the consciousness of the viewer and their conditioned attempts to reconstruct a narrative or hidden meaning from surface traces. The fractured surface of the prints conveys a feeling of fragmentation and in turn affects its suggestiveness and relationship with the viewer through its ambiguity. The images exploit and subvert the tendency to interpret and define both human emotion and artistic expression. The dark ambiguous spaces of each image defy explanation, subverting the desire to know the subject, but also suggesting interpretive possibility.

The vulnerable positions the subjects assume and their relationship with their environment gesture towards the ambivalence of life and death, the real and the imagined, the development of obscured feelings of social alienation and a sense of loss, and the ultimate reality of life and mortality.

The title Refluent Hours juxtaposes a sense of ‘flowing back’ – return and memory – with the calculated imposition of ‘hours,’ and gestures towards the arresting and reversal of time in both by the subject’s repose and the nature of photographic capture of the past. Each figure exists in a state of individual isolation and liminal stasis, ambiguously placed on the threshold of death and sleep, of subsumption by the natural world and of coherent individual subjectivity.