Life is shaped by chance and opportunity

I grew up in a working-class mining community in South Wales, at a time when opportunities to expand your horizons were limited.

I did not thrive academically, and my early path led into heavy industry. Through chance, the head of a local technical college put me forward for a role in engineering design—an opportunity that changed the course of my life. It gave me a creative outlet, enabled me to travel and showed me a world beyond the valleys where I grew up..

As a child, I was always curious about what lay beyond the hills. I had what my mother called “itchy feet,” and from my early twenties I travelled extensively. Like many, I arrived in new places with a guidebook in hand, following the same paths others had taken. I have many photographs from those journeys — images of well-known places that, over time, have blurred into one another.

What stayed with me were not the landmarks, but the moments in between. Sitting with people. Sharing food. Listening to their stories. Learning what the landscape meant to them.

Those experiences revealed something deeper — that place is not just what we see, but what is lived, remembered, and shared.

In our photographs we see mountains, oceans, and forests. Look closer, and there are homes and communities. Closer still, there are lives unfolding — people with their own stories, looking back out from those landscapes.

It was during a visit to Aotearoa in 2002 that this understanding truly took hold. While travelling the usual routes, I spent time at a small local festival near Geraldine in the South Island. That experience — being welcomed, listening, and connecting — shifted something. It moved me from being an observer to wanting to belong. That moment ultimately led me to make Aotearoa my home.

These experiences have shaped both my life and my work. They inform how I listen, how I create, and how I engage with place. My practice is grounded in the belief that meaning is often found in the overlooked — in the everyday, the local, and the ordinary.

I hope that by visiting here — whether through sound, image, or story — you might be encouraged to slow down, step beyond the familiar, and connect more deeply with the places and people around you.