When Cameron first started making prints and sketches he was drawn to found objects, old things, discarded, broken things.  Things that might have once been regarded as useful or beautiful but are no longer regarded at all.  There is a sort of poetry in the dusty, rusted objects, forgotten relics of time past.  Their bare simplicity attracted Cameron because they left so much room to explore composition and technique.

The respect Cameron holds for his subject is clear.  The work is imbued with a gentle strength that comes from looking in silence, without thinking, without thought.  Respecting what is, revering an objects very existence just because it exists. 

His flowers are a form of vanitas, displaying the transience of life.  The flower portrayed in its most magnificent state has now rotted away.  Its once proud petals have fallen.  Vanitas comes from the Latin and relates to vanity, ill placed pride, and emptiness of earthly possessions and accomplishments.  The prints humble us; remind us that our bodies are just transient carriers of soul and spirit.  The vast emptiness of the backgrounds allow for mediative contemplation of the ultimate futility of our physical existence.  They gently peel away our layers of ego and self-concern.

Similarly, the rhopographic works, depicting discarded, forgotten or trivial objects invert notions of importance and beauty.  An object that in our daily lives is seen as insignificant is imbued with great esteem.  The distortions of view or of size give the objects new life, new meaning, and new beauty. 

Cameron works methodically, quietly, and continually.  He finds as much inspiration in the process as in the original idea.  Making art, he says, is “just what I do”.  He doesn’t consider it work, nor is it always enjoyable.  It is simply what he does, how he communicates best.  There is no conscious political, religious, or social motive behind the work.  There is however, a very human motive.  A compelling atmosphere that asks the onlooker to look closer, because life is in the details.

Catriona Fraser