Stuart is a semi-professional photographer who lives and works in London. Completely self-taught, he has been taking pictures since he was given his first camera at the age of nine – which he describes as being “a very long time ago”.
In the late 1990s, after several decades of family photography, he began to fulfil a long-held desire to explore his artistic and creative side through photography. He first exhibited his photos in 2012 and his work has been shown many times since in both group and solo exhibitions.
Stuart’s work is based primarily on the built environment. He feels that there is so much that we no longer notice because we see it constantly – street furniture, the reflections in glass-fronted buildings, the patters of lines and contours in architecture. In his work he strives to make the viewer look again at everyday objects and see them in a new way, to realise that there is beauty in a bench, a flights of stairs, the shape a streetlamp makes against the sky.
His images reduce objects to line, pattern and colour with little reference to the original, and he rejoices in the patterns generated by repetition and not-quite-perfect-symmetry. His work was once described as “…geometry liberally splashed with colour…” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that one of his favourite artists is Piet Mondrian.
There are two main recurring themes in Stuart’s work: reflections, and steps and stairs. He loves the distorted, surreal shapes thrown up by reflections in windows and glass-fronted buildings, and he has a particular fascination for steps and stairs. He describes them as “…a sort of architectural koan; they are simultaneously static but moving, they go up and they go down, but they stay where they are”.
His work has been exhibited regularly at the London Photo Festival and the pop-up London Photo Gallery since 2012; at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2014; the East Finchley Arts Festival in 2015 and 2018; at the Lauderdale House summer photographic exhibition in 2016 and the London Art Biennale in 2023. He has also had solo exhibitions at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, in 2017; the Leal Cinema, London, in 2019, and now the Beerblefish Brewery, London, in 2023.
Stuart is donating 20% of all sales in this exhibition to Crisis, the national charity for people experiencing homelessness. He has volunteered with Crisis At Christmas every year since 1999 and, as an experienced volunteer, is responsible for running one of the shelters for rough sleepers in Central London over the Christmas period. In recent years, Beerblefish founders James and Bethany have joined him in volunteering at the shelter.
Catch Stuart on instagram and X at @scaphophoto
