Si Rhi

“There is a big difference between a good friend and a great one. A good friend would help you escape your issues, but a great friend would give you a shot of whisky, some hiking boots and a kick up the arse. ‘Go climb’, they’d say.” – Written at 7:46am whilst drinking tea outside in the garden, January 2018.

I am obsessed with my friends. They are the first people I ever started photographing and probably still one of my favourite creative subjects. It’s not because of the comfortability or the familiarity, it’s actually quite the opposite. Every single time the shutter button clicks, my film and I develop a whole new perspective on the person in front of us. My muse for this short photographic series in particular, was the mirroring soul of my non-biological sister and best friend, Rhiannon.

Over the past three weeks we haven’t really been on earth. Have you ever lost yourself tangoing across the constellations in space? We have. We ate a semi-good Margherita pizza with soggy tomatoes, jiggled and wiggled to live music on a Friday, felt burns of Patron licking at our throats and laughed ridiculously loud in a prestigious line of elderly art academics. We would drink coffees and crushed juices and randomly stop talking mid-sentence to start reading our foreign language books – her, German and I, Italian. In the day we would walk the city landscape like gullible travellers and at night we would sprawl out in bed as if polite space and barriers were unspoken myths. To me, Rhiannon is almost like a place rather than just a person; she is a feeling and an energy.

In Si Rhi, I wanted to take the traditional forms of an image and completely distort reality with digital manipulation. Processed like a digital decoupage, I individually stripped back the different shapes, sizes and colours and built them together on a blended layer. These images were taken to represent our dream state. In a collision and somewhat balanced medium between the physical and the mental, the images are a moment of human mirage. Whether it’s in a wave, newspaper, or the backdrop of polkadots, I must ask you – can you truly and completely Si Rhi?