Jennifer Mason is a double agent. By day, the successful commercial photographer shoots ravishing images of weddings, fashion and food. After hours, there’s another Jennifer Mason at work, an award-winning artist who inhabits a dark world populated by dysfunction and secrets.

Since graduating with a Fine Arts degree from Elam in 2005, Mason has made a career out of documenting the good things in life. As an artist her carefully choreographed digital artworks ask what’s happening behind the scenes.

Dip into family photo albums all around the world and you’re likely to find similar pictures, of graduations, holidays, children with trophies. “No one ever has to ask themselves what to take a picture of, they just pick up the camera,” observes Mason; “I’m interested in what’s happening just out of view.” Her new works look at the side of family life that never appears in photo albums: resentments, jealousies, angry late-night rows are shot in a yellowed tungsten hue that casts the viewer as voyeur peering through a neighbour’s window at night. Mason uses actors to play out the imagined scenes adding a noir-ish film-set quality to the images. The effect is of a mini psycho drama in every frame.

“My art is not going to be universally liked because it’s not commercial”, Mason says, “but if just one person in the room relates to it, I feel I’ve done my job as an artist.”