Artist bio
Daniel Rose is a visual artist and graphic designer whose practice operates at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation. His work is characterised by a fascination with creating new aesthetics through the combination of human intervention and nature. Nature provides the setting in which he creates new, predominantly graphic worlds. Beginning with a sketch or a creative idea, he constructs staged tableaux, altering the lighting, perspective, and arrangement of objects before releasing the shutter. This process of discovery becomes an exploration of, and a pause within, the gaze in search of a reality inherent in the image. For Rose, photography is a medium full of secrets and magic, capable of transforming and examining the representation of objects as uniquely staged performances for the camera. This fascination drives his practice, creating images in which the visible touches the invisible and where, ideally, the world has lost its sense of scale.
Statement
Fascinated by nature and its wildness, I draw inspiration from the angles, the space and the volumes it offers us. In a world that is constantly in motion, photography allows me to take my time: to observe, to compose and to understand. Through a practice situated at the intersection of staging and pure reality, I have found a way to develop my own style of still-life collage. Through this creative process, the boundaries of the representational are dissolved, and familiar elements lose their original meaning, only to re-emerge in surprising configurations. The process of constructing abstract still-life collages using colourful panels and plants resembles the meditative art form of ikebana. I construct a collage in nature’s studio, which is then captured. Light, in its physical form, is refracted, directed, absorbed and scattered to create a new object as an image. Abstraction transforms the image – spatially and temporally – into a still life that never actually existed.
