Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

In his early years, Colin was influenced by Dianne Arbus and later by Peter Gasser and Walker Evans, especially the pictures taken by the latter in 1930s mid-west America. He is particularly fascinated by the myriad of cultural and visual stimuli that the multimedia explosion has generated.

Colin is intrigued by the question: nature or nurture? He is adopted and, in his late teens, learned that his birth parents were an artist and a concert pianist. This discovery led to a desire to explore the relationship that people have with the place they inhabit: at home, at work, or in the local area. His photographs open up the fault-lines between subject and environment to reveal the space in which identity is created.

Colin’s style is strongly narrative, with minimal interaction between subject and viewer. His pictures are intensely personal, yet freighted with strangeness, playing on the tension between familiarity and absurdity, convention and innovation. His work is imaginative, intuitive and has an honesty which is rarely found elsewhere.