This series of conceptual beauty portraits evokes both the splendour and horror of liquid petroleum hydrocarbons, but I chose this particular theme because of my fascination with how we are destroying the only place we can call home. I drew from the models’ natural beauty as my starting point, and together with my team I crafted a representation of this concept that straddles both allure and sadness, this disastrous frenzy born of the risks we take to consume the way that we do. The colours and lines in the images are beguiling, but at the same time there is melancholy and misery layered and masked in their painted faces. The tragedy of oil spills breaths life and iridescence into something normally associated with catastrophe and anguish, and I feel others might empathise with the underlying tones underneath all the shiny paint and glowing glitter.

I endeavour to craft photographs that reach within you, evoking thoughts and emotions in the absence of motion and sound. My photography is compositionally clean and balanced in colour, but my themes and subject matters are often dark, visceral, and evocative in their expression of the threads that run throughout all our stories. 

I drew inspiration from our ailing environment for this series, as at the time I was fascinated by oil spills and the havoc that they leave in their wake. I saved photographs of light bouncing off of oil, and I was mesmerised by the soft reds, deep purples, and brilliant blues of the bubbles floating to the surface of the muck that strangled the seas. 

My current work is largely commissioned editorial and advertising work, but my creativity is often at its most vigorous when I’m doing work that focuses on causes and concepts close to me. Growing up in the Philippines gave me an honest understanding of the delicate balance of nature, and living by the sea opened my eyes to how humanity was poisoning our greatest resource. I still have close relationships with many friends who live in coastal towns, and they have shared how their struggle is greater than ever with sludge and slurry taking over their shores. 

I aspire to continue creating more conceptual work along the lines of this project, perhaps drawing inspiration from other ideas concerning the environment such as wildfire and plastic pollution as well as politics, human rights, and other stories that form the forefront of our modern consciousness.