I began drawing with my camera one evening when I was caught up in peak hour traffic. As I photographed the dying light my exposures got longer and longer until I found myself more excited by what the movement of the camera was doing to the image than the actual subject. The tail lights of the cars in front of me became as seductive as pots of ink I could dip my fingers into and I found myself increasing the length of my exposures so that I had the time I needed to complete my ‘drawings’.

Not wanting to stop, I continued at home using the bare bulb of a lamp as my ‘ink’. Unlike the act of drawing on paper where you can see your line as you go, the camera leaves no visible trace in the air – the drawing only visible as a dance your hand makes as it moves the camera, driven by memory and instinct. The freedom and abstraction of the line is a direct response to the blind nature of the work and the necessity to put it down fast. After long hours drawing into the night I found that my body became an extension of the camera, and the drawings, a dance my body was making as I felt my way towards the figure in the dark.

To my mind these images, while technically photographs, are true drawings, the only difference being that my ink was the light of a lamp and my pen was the camera.

(a selection of 8 drawings were selected to be part of the 2008 Dobell Drawing Prize, AGNSW.