Caroline McHardy

I am a photographer from Bromley in Kent. I love to photograph the surreal and supernatural, always photographing outside the box because of my Asperger’s – a form of high functioning autism.

Because of the Covid 19 pandemic and lockdown, I built a miniature studio in my bedroom, and then used a variety of materials around the house such as a huge cardboard post tube, to making a miniature cemetery by my bed. Then developing my images in Photoshop to create parallel images and reflections like seeing double. Photographing my images I used a torch as a light source and captured my photographs at night. This work has the message of being an enigma; I wanted to create a series of work that shows the poetic abstract nature of death. The doll’s house represents how we die, and the mysterious psyche of the human mind, which drives us to do something. Using electric candles that fit inside the house, I also photographed this at night with all of the lights off with only the torch and candle on. Both series of work is in rich monochrome, another reminder of mortality as in death we are drained of colour and met with the blinding light of the afterlife, the other side that banishes the living.