Artist Profile - Michelle Burrows

By Colin Serjent

I have a longstanding and continuing passion for photography. The journey began as a young adult taking the usual family snapshots and recording holidays.

After moving to Liverpool it provided me with many new opportunities to explore and capture its varied and colourful culture. The annual Brouhaha street festival event soon became a hot favourite of mine in regard to taking photographs.

Wishing then to take a more formalized approach I undertook a short photographic course which covered black and white photography, dark room techniques and themed projects, including documentary work, portraiture and landscapes. The course also introduced the 'horror' that I felt, at that time, towards computers.

However, the giant leap forward to working with computers finally unleashed new and wonderful ways to explore and be creative. From this initial tentative step a large and developing body of colour abstract work has emerged. Items which are usually strong in colour, shape and texture are selected to form collages or small home made sculptures; these are the raw materials which form the base of the images.

The photographs are then scanned into the now befriended computer, which may then be printed as they are, or have software filters added to create different effects.

I have found that my more traditional work constantly informs and underpins the more recent digital work. I especially enjoy impressionistic and also more subtle trace-like effects because it plays with suggestion, distortion and also invites the viewer to make up their own story.

The last four years have been very productive in terms of creating work, exhibitions, reviews and displays in local galleries, bistros and restaurants. Particular appreciation goes to Colin Serjent (a fellow photographer) for his considerable support and encouragement.

More recently, my work is more figurative, for example, the piece 'What's on TV', is a collage of images, and 'Window' explores voyeurism and our insatiable appetite to observe what other people get up to.

The recent launch of Red Dot Exhibitions is a welcome opportunity to exhibit my work with other artists. Their next exhibition, which will include a selection of my work, will be at the ArtSpeQ gallery in Quiggins Centre in Liverpool, beginning in November.

I will continue my journey with my camera taking pictures of all that I discover along the way.