The Reflections Series started with something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The idea of identity. We only see ourselves in reflection. We never see ourselves as others see us. What we think of as our true image is reversed in a mirror or in a photo. When we see ourselves in a photo that someone else has taken we don’t think it looks like us because that’s not the face we see in the mirror. Even a portrait is our image seen through the eyes of the artist. It’s that moment when we see ourselves reflected in a shop window we don’t recognise ourselves for a moment. This work is taken from a series of photos of a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights.

The human eye sees the lights differently to the camera. When I saw the lights they were white and very pale green and occasionally pale pink. The camera sees the lights as green. That’s what we expect to see when we first see them. It's a shock to see them as wispy and white. I realised that it was exactly like our reflection. We can never see us as we really are. Every image we see of ourselves is always a reflected image. The windows in the restaurant were triple glazed, Norway is cold! That made the challenge of working out the layers of the work a lot more complicated.