Erin Ocean Thorogood

Photography - BA (Hons)

I have always been drawn to art from a young age, only going into my teens I decided photography is where my creativity belonged. Since finding a love in taking photos I quickly started using it therapeutically, I find it gives me a voice to express my opinions. I often put a lot of my personal feelings and emotions into a project, text is a large part of my practice I find it helps create a whole story, as well as the use of collage.

I want to explore what causes anxiety and I want to push against what people are comfortable talking about. I want to make people think and I want to create work that talks about what some might see as taboo.

Throughout my photographic education I have tried to experiment with as much as I could while trying to find what I am most passionate about, I am still working it all out, but I want people to feel something or find my work as therapeutic as I do. I want to create images that creates a voice for what matters.

My body of work is a series of empty compositions with the subject being a flower in most final images. This idea evolved from my anxiety over leaving university, as this will be my first time out of education. It is frightening being given all that freedom, especially if you feel as if your education is far from finished. What started as visually exploring these anxious feelings, became a process of continuing to examine and expand my various bodies of work where I saw gaps.

I was drawn to empty compositions as a visual illustration of the holes I saw in previous projects, forming a visual representation of the emotion that these gaps evoke. The large compositions form two opposing points of view: the vastness of space yet to be explored as well as the potential it can hold for future experiences.

As a recurring motif throughout my work, flowers have become a visual symbol for personal feeling, while also being used for their decorative potential to puncture the emptiness of the composition. My exhibition will also contain my previous workbooks as a symbol of my education and my source of inspiration throughout the exploration of my work.