It started off with one of many images taken on a sunny day atop Tara Hill in late May as I ambled about with a DSLR searching for source material for mirrored compositions. I was attracted here to the branch protruding towards the sky from the tangled mass below.

I took the photograph home and began playing with it on my tablet using a mirror app to see if I could make anything out of it and gradually something interesting began to emerge…

So I went back and took more photos of the pile when the light was softer to avoid the high contrast and impenetrable shadows of summer sunlight. As the weather at the time was glorious for days at a stretch, this required patience … But finally, I hit on an arrangement which I liked (in early July – unfortunately, as most of the intermediate steps were done on a mirroring app on my tablet, they are not recorded).

The base image that I was finally to use was taken on a 4 x 5 large format film camera  with a very old Zeiss 185mm lens and scanned onto my laptop, then I edited and edited and edited…

Finally, I achieved the composition which I felt brought out the best version of the central face while at the same time replacing or erasing any detail that distracted the eye from the overall composition. There were long periods of inaction where I would leave this piece aside to work on something else for a week or two, then come back with fresh eyes, and an important part of the process involved printing the piece to see how it looks in a physical form as opposed to on a screen – call me old-fashioned, but for me an image isn’t finished until it is printed. There were many points when I thought I was finished with it, only for a little detail –sometimes only a tiny branch in one corner of the frame – to annoy me and demand transformation or removal. But eventually I linked my laptop to the biggest TV in the house, looked at my little monster blown up to three foot across, and decided that no further work was required. I hope you feel the effort was worth it!