My approach to the photographic portrait began some years ago when I decided to photograph the staff of Maidstone college of Art from behind (Area of Heads 1996).  I focussed on the details of the hairline and became intrigued by how individual and revealing this area can be. 

The series grew as I collected napes from office staff at Acme Housing Association in 1996, the staff of a bar/restaurant (Soho Heads 1996), the ushers from Stratford Picture House cinema (Close Knit Crew 1998), guests at a private view (Partners 1997) and strangers on the tube. 

The differences and similarities afforded by this fragment of the body are offered for scrutiny.  These heads look beyond our gaze and we contemplate a vulnerability, a part of ourselves that is in the public domain and yet is strangely unfamiliar.  The conjoined napes mused upon the oddly erotic qualities of this part of the body by presenting a surreal symmetry that alluded to the exposure of an altogether more intimate part of the anatomy (Dyad 1997).

For the About Face exhibitions shown in the spring of 2000 I visited Madame Tussauds workshop and the wig departments of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and at the Barbican.  I made photographs of the back of these man-made heads and then invited people into the studio to be photographed against a neutral white backdrop.  It was important that the subject was as balanced as possible and great attention was placed on the control of tonality and the use of negative space around the rising nape and hair.  In this series the real and the artificial are juxtaposed and disturbing notions of simulacra  were suggested.