The Skinny Showcase: Stewart Honeyman

"I grew up in a field near Newcastle which meant lots of countryside and farming. Having been gifted my grandfather's DSLR at the age of 16 I was out documenting the world around me. Then moving to Manchester to study photography at Manchester Metropolitan University I continued to document how I saw the world.

"During my time at university I was introduced to a photographic studio; here I could document my world in a different way from before. Now I could use objects that I found interesting to portray a message. I found a new way of photographing the countryside and farming that I had grown up with.

"My passion for still-life photography grew over my time at university. Having explored the De Stijl movement in Dutch Modernist art I was fascinated with their ideals of using art to advertise their ideals of society. Taking reference from the often oversaturated world of advertising my work has always been vibrant; however, in a move away from the glossy perfection, much like with Andy Warhol's pop art, I try to include a human element to my work by creating intentional mistakes. I started to see my still-life work as a way of getting a message across in an appealing way.

"With my current project, Food Waste, I used still life images to create a graphical depiction of the amount of food wasted in the UK in a given time. This project is currently featured in the Pingyao photography festival. I left university with a first and a newfound love for the still-life genre but also commercialism's impact on the world and how these two can interlink."