‘Wormwood’ is a surreal landscape of the imagination: a fairytale forest, like a Jean Cocteau set, a dream, an illusion. Its woodlands are enchanted; the trees’ twisting boughs like corporeal limbs, the leafless branches serpentine. Branches caress the figure like dark thoughts; intricate lacework binding her, pulling her back to the earth, into decay, or back to a primal consciousness.

The solitary female figure in these images wears garments of a style which recall old postcards and daguerreotype portraits. The poses are tense within the frame - the heads are cropped crudely - and the face is always obscured by deep shadow. The camera’s point of view is obsessive: a focused gaze of intent, as if to penetrate beyond and beneath the surface of the subject. The woman’s attire invites the gaze - textures of silk, cotton, lace: a thin veneer over flesh. The garments - fitting so closely over the body - encase and cover, offering a tactile seduction, a fetishization of materiality.

‘Wormwood’ is a suite of black and white photographs which is informed by the history of photography, and which draws upon surrealist photography, psychology, mythology, morality, eroticism, and symbolism. It depicts a place existing in the dark hours, in the deep recesses of the subconscious; in a state of loneliness, violence, narcotic intoxication, hallucination, uncontrolled fantasy.

These photographs are fragments of these liminal states, and the vessel of these explorations is the female subject. She is the threshold between these states of consciousness, her flesh the boundary of interior and exterior worlds.

Jane Burton 2007