Steve Bucknell's photos

Detail, Southwell Minster

Space to space, place to place, from the Rose Red City, through the canyons of Arizona to this disused quarry. These faces stand rosy gold and silver, glittering mica and mercury. A crux: a matrix of radiance, of carved crests and cut shadows. A furrowed brow of metamorphoses, This is the wall of the law, the wall of the kingdom; a reckoning. It takes your perception, and your presence to carry the weight of the curved stone, like a wave. It takes back time, absorbs and weeps again. It embraces the old light and the new, and questions you with all that has happened, and all that can. It includes us in its impermanent transformations, and buries us in its rolling red layers of sunset and dawn.

Mosaics and hanging gardens, saturated islands floating from Kyoto to the Taiga. Mosses and lichens offer luxuriant lodgings: spongy velvet sofas, fungal carpets. In this damp forest strange beasts thrive: tardigrades and water piglets, nymph mites and springtails slip between the fronds. On this decaying bark liverworts and fire-dots, rusts and flaky plaques; milky galaxies merge, expand and shrivel. And summer rain continues, trickling through the shadows. I kneel to set the frame, to see what’s there: balanced on one wet knee: I take a photograph. It seems a kind of prayer.

From Chapel of St.James the Less, Midhopestones.