Influenced by the spirit of Japanese Ukiyo-e masters like Utagawa Hiroshige and Hokusai, Shepard embraces a practice of wandering freely without a specific purpose. This approach allows him to merge conscious and unconscious sensitivities, resulting in works that are not strict representations of a place but rather evocations of their experience.

Walking with a camera, he gathers fragments: hundreds of quick images of whatever catches his eye. These moments are later intricately cut, layered, and reassembled in Photoshop to form a singular image that is both fractured and whole —what he calls the omni-jective view of memory: many perspectives, one vision.
 

For the exhibition at Holland Park Shepard has created two new large scale print works on Japanese Takeo Kakita paper that respond specifically to the experience of the Park itself. The works provide a compressed, rearranged encounter with the parks seasons, born of both photographic reality and imaginative reconstruction - the parts are real, but the whole, its truth, is imagined. An assemblage then, of the gathered impressions and memories caught with the camera and orchestrated with the mind’s eye into a single image, Holland Park as captured in a waking dream.

Alongside the two large prints are several more of Shepard’s wanderings printed on Dai-ōban-sized (30.5 x 42cm) sheets of Kizuki-Hosho washi made by Ichibei Iwano, a ninth-generation washi maker and designated Ningen Kokuhō (Living National Treasure) of Japan in editions of 1 with 2 artist proofs. This unique washi, once used by Edo-era artists like Hokusai, lends historical resonance to Shepard’s contemporary process. Shepard’s prints are produced in collaboration with master printer Mitsuhiro Matsudaira at Atelier Matsudaira in Tokyo.

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Justin Hibbs