HOLLOW COLUMN Photograph

Neil Massey (b).1970 After studying photography at Bournemouth Art School, Neil spent the following 15 years based in London working as an editorial photographer. During this time, he travelled the world extensively, commissioned to photograph musicians and youth subcultures. In 2009, Neil and his wife moved to Vietnam where they lived for six years. They fell in love with Vietnamese culture and its people, witnessing a communist country embracing capitalism and undergoing rapid economic and cultural development. This provided the backdrop to a series of long-term photographic projects; ‘Untitled', 'Bloody Chunks', 'Song', and 'Monobloc' which make up ‘The Vietnam Collection’ (2009-2015). This body of work explores Vietnamese life, in all its raw unadulterated beauty. In 2020 during the London lockdown whilst Neil was scanning his 20+ year film archive, he found some neon acrylic artworks he painted in the height of his raving days in the early 90’s. Once digitised, he went to work creating a series of artworks he calls KALEIDESCAPES - mixed-media artworks using photography, neon dust / paints and blacklight. To date he has created two bodies of work RAVE ON - inspired by closed eye hallucination, kaleidoscopes, feedback loops and chaos theory. With ORDER AND CHAOS he worked with nature during a snow dump in spring and heat wave in the summer. This time snow, cracked earth and wild flowers were his impermanent canvas. Making these works provides Neil with a very personal kaleidescopic escape, a technicolour adventure into the unknown, creating new worlds for the 3rd Millennium.