A Peculiar Convenience is a long-term body of work that considers human ascendancy over the natural world and our historic and ongoing need to manage, control and contain it. I originally thought of the work as a tragi-comedic study of our relationship with the natural world and how we have packaged and perfected it to our needs and desires. But with our increased understanding of climate breakdown, in a world that we have created (the Anthropocene), and as the evidence mounts, comes something much darker and it feels more relevant and more pervasive than ever. The images, sometimes everyday details, sometimes humorous, provide us with a much more uncomfortable realisation, and lead us to consider how and why we have got to where we are. We can stuff a dead animal, put it in a box, we can use nature as camouflage, we can force and control, but we have exploited and abused the natural world for our own convenience - controlling, conquering, sanitizing, packaging and perfecting. We present ourselves with a conflicted and dark message. These images seek to remind us, as we stare out over the precipice with an increasing sense of unease and fear, that we've overlooked the natural balance, the natural order. We're not in control at all. We've been kidding ourselves all along. “Ask anyone, for what purpose everything exists. The general answer is that everything was created for our practical use and accommodation. In short, the whole magnificent scene of things is daily and confidently asserted to be ultimately intended for the peculiar convenience of mankind. Thus do the bulk of the human species vauntingly elevate themselves above the innumerable existences that surround them.” G.H. Toulmin, The Antiquity and Duration of the World, 1780.