from still life i was to produce my own ideas and work, i have always found still life to be tiresome in its austerity and wanted to take a new approach to refresh this area of photography and painting. i played around with rotting fruit, smashed it and photographed it, alas i could still not shake the shackles of the forebearers of still life. i decided to take my idea into a less practical avenue, thinking less about my final product and more about the thought process behind the product. the rotting fruit reminded me of illness and decay, of sickness and putrescence. along these lines that ensued i started to research fruit in sexual intercourse but not the kind of work that is so common in fruit and art full of connotations, i wanted something that felt real and gritty. so i followed with the idea of fruit contracting sexually transmitted diseases and infections. with these afflictions posed toward the fruit i started to see the basis of an idea. i took an example from the AIDS virus and wondered if i could create an alternate time in the eighties when the AIDS epidemic was reaching it's height, a parody, for lack of better expression, was created around fruit contracting the virus and there being an epidemic affecting the economy of england, through people using fruit in there sexual deviances. i researched surgeon generals reports, government warnings and statistical reports etcetera to discover more about the epidemic that happened before i was born. the project took yet another turn and in its original innocence became an educational insight into the biggest problem in modern world history. in my research, over and over again the key to this illness was mentioned over and over again, education. i mused that maybe i could use this body of work as a tool of education, people offended by the idea of a parody would surely purpose to people learning more about AIDS.
