I was looking at an exhibition of children’s art the other day which brought into focus for me what I am trying to do with my digital images. Up until the age of 11 the child reacts directly to visual experience – they will produce work which shows what is important to them – a map of the way they see the world. But then the shades of the prison house begin to close, the demands of objective representation grow more and more insistent and, even worse, the demands to imitate existing methods of representation.

In my work I try to recapture that unmediated view of the world around me and indeed the visual experience of a myopic child where form dissolves into colour. I find that using computer technology offers me another way of achieving this aim.

I start by taking photographs – of street scenes, fly posters, rubbish – anything that will give me areas of strong colour. I then work on them through Photoshop degrading the image and adding texture and pattern. Sometimes I will produce something that is non-representational but at other times people will start coming back into the pictures.