Alex Macdougall
Alex is a furniture maker, artist and photographer, working both in collaboration with other artists and independently. He uses the act of working with wood as a gateway into conversations and critiques around sustainability and environmentalism, and our lost spiritual connections to the natural world. Preferring to work more quietly with hand tools such as the chisel, plane and handsaw, he creates well-crafted furniture, and other objects and structures out of wood, both small and large. He likes to take the unique features of a material he’s working with as a starting point for how the design develops, considering fully the aesthetic and psychological associations people may draw when interacting with a piece once it is complete.
Alex is a photographer using both analogue and digital mediums, favouring the tactile processes of the darkroom which allow for greater experimentation. Manipulating film development and printing processes enable him to get closer to ‘photographing’ dreams and memory as his subject, as well as exploring alternative ways of representing architectural subjects. Through combining these methods, he seeks to explore the deeper questions that he is ultimately most interested in.