Hollow Ponds London, United Kingdom
I’m a Walthamstow-born musician and photographer working as Hollow Ponds. Formerly a member of Stereolab, I now release my own music under the same name and freelance as a French horn player. My photography explores reflections in liquid — puddles, rivers, oceans, coffee, spilled drinks and occasionally less appealing substances — transforming overlooked surfaces into strange, painterly worlds.
It all began with a search for something that wasn’t there.
In 2022, I was looking for dried-up ponds and empty bodies of water to photograph for the artwork of an imminent music release under my recording name, Hollow Ponds. I wanted an image that somehow captured the idea behind the name. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any suitable empty ponds.
Shortly afterwards, while touring in France, I visited Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny. Standing on the famous Japanese bridge, I took a photograph of my reflection in the pond below. Something about the resulting image intrigued me. I’d set out to find hollow ponds, only to discover Hollow Ponds — myself, and the beginnings of an entirely new artistic identity — reflected in a full one.
That photograph marked the beginning of an unexpected journey. The long, occasionally tedious hours between rehearsals, soundchecks and performances became opportunities for further experiments. I started looking down rather than around, searching for images in puddles, rivers, drinks and whatever other liquids presented themselves. What began as a diversion gradually developed into a photographic practice of its own.
Working as Hollow Ponds, I now make photographs using whatever reflective surfaces happen to present themselves. A puddle on a London pavement, a river in India, the remains of a drink after a concert, or even something considerably less appealing can offer an unexpected window onto another version of reality. Most encounters are spontaneous, although when the rain disappears and the puddles dry up, I occasionally resort to staging my own. Even then, what appears in the reflection remains largely beyond my control.
The process is deceptively simple. I photograph the reflected world and subsequently rotate the image through 180 degrees, restoring the scene to something resembling its conventional orientation. But this apparent correction introduces an entirely new set of distortions. Buildings dissolve, figures fragment, colours bleed into one another and familiar landscapes acquire the qualities of paintings. The result is neither quite documentary nor entirely abstract.
Much of this work has developed alongside my life as a musician. I was formerly a member of Stereolab, and continue to work as a freelance French horn player while releasing my own compositions under the Hollow Ponds name. Touring provides an ever-changing collection of locations and opportunities to look at the world differently. Bad weather is usually an advantage, although a prolonged dry spell requires a little ingenuity. In the absence of puddles or ponds, a discarded drink or an unfortunate spillage can prove equally productive.
What interests me most is the gap between the image I set out to capture and the one that eventually reveals itself. I often have a particular subject or composition in mind, but the behaviour of liquid makes the outcome impossible to predict. Ripples, movement, shifting light, even steam rising from a hot cup of coffee intervene, reshaping familiar scenes into something unexpected. It’s a collaboration of sorts: I choose what to photograph, but the liquid has its own ideas. Only later, examining the images at home, do I fully discover what we’ve made between us.
This approach owes much to musical improvisation. A musician might choose a particular key, rhythm or harmonic framework without knowing precisely where the performance will lead. Similarly, I establish a few simple conditions and allow circumstances to determine the outcome. The surprises, mistakes and unplanned encounters are often the most rewarding elements.
Recently, I’ve begun bringing the two sides of my creative life into closer conversation through a series of short musical compositions I call Sonic Stills. Each piece takes an individual photograph as its starting point, attempting to uncover the sounds, moods and possibilities contained within a single suspended instant. An image that records only a fleeting disturbance in water can become the basis for several minutes of musical exploration. In this way, the photograph becomes less a finished object than the beginning of another creative journey.
There is a fascinating historical parallel in the Ragamala paintings associated with North Indian classical music. These works give visual expression to the emotional and atmospheric qualities of particular ragas, interpreting musical ideas through figures, landscapes, colour and narrative. With Sonic Stills, I find myself travelling in the opposite direction, listening imaginatively to a photograph and allowing its visual character to suggest a musical response. Both approaches are concerned with the possibilities of translation between artistic languages, and with what might emerge when one medium is asked to express the qualities of another.
Colour has also become increasingly important to the photographs themselves. The reflective surface often behaves like an unpredictable painter, breaking apart the relationships between objects and introducing combinations that would be difficult to invent deliberately. Rather than treating these distortions as imperfections, I welcome them as the very substance of the work.
October 2026 marked an important moment with my first solo exhibition, On (and off) the Road, at Three Rooms Gallery in Walthamstow Village. The location had a particular personal significance: I grew up at No. 47 Beulah Road, immediately opposite the gallery. Showing four years of photographs in a building I had looked out towards as a child brought the wandering nature of the project full circle.
The photographs have also begun appearing beyond conventional exhibition spaces. East End Brewing Company selected one of my images for the badge of its Pilsner, an unexpected and rather fitting destination for work that so often begins by staring into a drink.
Underlying everything is a fascination with unpredictability. We increasingly inhabit environments tailored to our existing tastes, where algorithms and personal preferences help determine what we encounter. I find something liberating in pursuing a practice that resists this kind of control. A reflection cannot be instructed to behave, and the most interesting image may be the one I would never have thought to look for.
Perhaps that is what keeps me returning to puddles, glasses and stretches of water: the possibility that something entirely unfamiliar is waiting inside the most ordinary of things, visible for an instant before disappearing again.
