The remarkable similarity of a Pyke composite to the order displayed in a Victorian museum’s specimen drawer is far from accidental. Taxonomy favours symmetry and formal elegance, for it both orders being and contextualises it within both time and space.

Steve Pyke’s multiple images offer an intriguing view of his passions for form and order, for they play with some defining characteristics of the photograph. The one-eyed, paralysed vision of the camera can only be surmounted by assemblages of images which seek, like a painting, to create an overlapping set of representations, a sort of layering effect which reproduces the experience of seeing. Hockney developed his own distinctive approach to the form: Pyke has created another, which takes off from his deft use of the square 6x6cm format. In his collages time can pass and space can move.


© Peter Hamilton