The photo-based project titled ‘dis/order’ represents a continuation of my interest in bringing elements of the everyday, along with personal and autobiographical content, into an aestheticised and conceptual art practice. I am fascinated by junk drawers because they are the places people stash things they don’t know what to do with but are not ready to throw out. In essence, I think a junk drawer represents the owner’s id – the parts of themselves that are messy, disorganized, and unexamined. Acting as an artist/analyst, I create portraits of people, couples, and families by ordering, and then photographing, the fragments of their lives they normally keep hidden in a junk drawer.

The process of sorting and arranging the junk drawer contents is an investigation into my own impulse to organize and control things as well as a response to my father’s hoarding. The title is intended to forefront the tension between the randomness found in a junk drawer (disorder) and my desire to put things in their proper place (order). It also begs the question, ‘How might my compulsion to order be a form of disorder?’

As with much of my work, I hope to encourage viewers to reconsider familiar objects and to find in them metaphoric and expressive content.