One day there is life. A man, for example, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness. Everything is as it was, as it will always be. He goes from one day to the next, minding his own business, dreaming only of the life that lies before him. And then suddenly it happens there is death. A man lets out a little sigh, he slumps down in his chair, and it is death. The suddenness of it leaves no room for thought, gives the mind no chance to seek out a word that might comfort it. We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die for no apparent cause, for a man to simply die because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment. Invisible Boundaries (IB) is a collection of just over a thousand images of the space I have lived in for the past seven years. In essence IB is a collection or archive of my living space over a period of 36 months, it visits the same location(s), records the traces and my tracing (movements) around these locations and has some visual similarities to contemporary social documentary photography which I explore in some detail later in this text. The collection (IB) documents approximately three years between 1999 and 2002, although various other visual works led up to this project including: 'roadworks' (1997), a year documenting the surface of the road outside my home (using a grid system to record the theatre and subliminal changes in this space); 'coloured squares' (Phoenix Gallery Brighton -1992), a series of locales near to my then home imaged as a number of coloured squares (from signs, buildings and other inanimate material); Helen's Seat, ( University of Plymouth -1997) the same taken from a seat left in memoriam for Helen ( who 'loved this spot'), my camera recorded the 'same' scene looking out to sea and my personal pilgrimage to this spot over a period of two years and continues in my most recent works 'drift objects', ( Thelma Holbert Gallery -2003) and my current digital project 'My Walk to Work' (2004- ). The major difference being, the size and scale of IB, in its thousand images and the archive/collection of images which interrelate.

The title Invisible Boundaries refers to the notion of serial image making whilst moving around a fixed space. Here in IB the home becomes this geometrical reference point a fixed set of parameters which allow the notions of sequence and serialisation to be tested, separated by distinctions of time and date. The project built a sense of place by continually examining these rooms and areas, a pre occupation then with measuring a specific time, (shutter speed) moment against another recording and previous documentation. The objects/rooms are invisible and yet at the same time they are becoming visible photographically and this condition defines them through this accumulation of moments that lend themselves to that which simulates a diary. However my initial reasoning and measuring through the lens seemed to negate this analysis of subjectivity but one more where this measured objectivity is the representational screen . Each picture is presented in its entirety without enlargement; however the title recognises that these are not simply recordings of topographical facts and that there is another image to the side of each of these frames or outside of these frames, these moments, which remains unrecorded. Stephen Shore wrote in the Nature of Photographs that 'a photograph has edges, the world does not' and borders reflect where the pictures themselves end.