On The Way to Bluedom Longlisted in the 2025 Booooooom Photo Awards
On the Way To Bluedom, 100 x 123cm, Museum Quality Giclee Print on Hahnemuehle German Etching Rag 310gsm
I’m very pleased to share that my artwork On The Way to Bluedom was selected in the longlist of the 2025 Booooooom Photo Awards.
It is always encouraging when a work finds resonance beyond the studio, beyond the website, and beyond the immediate circle of people who already know what I do. This recognition feels particularly meaningful because Booooooom has, over many years, become a highly visible international platform for contemporary art and photography. Founded in 2008 by Vancouver artist Jeff Hamada, it describes itself as Canada’s highest-traffic art platform and as an authoritative voice in contemporary art that has helped bring emerging artists to international attention.
The scale of this year’s awards also gives the longlisting real weight. On its 2025 Photo Awards page, Booooooom says that the 200 longlisted images were selected from record submissions comprising nearly 20,000 photographs. To have On The Way to Bluedom included in that field is something I’m genuinely proud of.
What especially pleases me about this recognition is that On The Way to Bluedom was selected in the Colour category. Colour is at the heart of this work. The blue is not incidental to the image; it is the image’s force, vitality and emotional charge. It gives the work its movement, luminosity and sense of life.
I titled the work On The Way to Bluedom because “Bluedom” felt to me like a destination that could never fully be reached. It keeps changing, just as the artwork keeps changing each time I look at it. The image seems to ask me to keep searching a little more for blue, as though blue were not simply a colour, but a place of feeling and possibility.
What matters to me in that title is its double edge. Bluedom is not only a place of calm. Blue can suggest darkness, distance and melancholy, but it can also suggest coolness, release, spaciousness and a lessening of stress. Perhaps that is the real force of the work: that it moves between those states, carrying both tension and relief at once.
That is why it feels so right to see the work recognised in the Colour category. The blue does more than describe what is there. It transforms the image and keeps asking something of me each time I return to it.
I’m grateful to Director Levi Unrau and the 2025 Booooooom team of judges for including the work in this year’s longlist, and very pleased to see it recognised in a category that speaks so directly to the quality that drives it most strongly.
