Inspirations - This Sceptred Isle

"This precious stone set in the silver sea"
William Shakespeare

Like the documents of decay which make up my Dis/Integration and Surface projects, many of the  other photographs I take in this country are studies in the power of nature, its capacity both to create and destroy, and through either process create a purity of beauty which is at once definitely aesthetic and indefinably metaphysical.  

Each image a captured moment, an experience, and each immediately lost in time, the record merely a substitute, a cipher for the experience. The moment becomes the stuff of memory, and imagination, without the possibility of empirical verification...the time and space changed irrevocably even as the shutter closes. 

And so the image becomes what it evokes. Recognition, recollection, inspiration, contemplation. The viewer experiences not the moment which was captured, but their own response to the record. The empty beach becomes their personal environment, the flower blooms in an imagined garden, the landscape creates a landscape of the mind. 

The captured moment is just the starting point, the catalyst for a reaction and the beginning of a journey. The image may be manipulated and distorted to create a more concentrated, distilled version of the moment, into which  we pour the water of our own emotion and experience. Every image is an imperfect representation of a perfect moment, and from every image, we create or recreate our own. 

The coast, landscape, urbanisation and countryside of this land, the power of nature shaping and changing them moment by moment, subtly and violently, creating images of beauty and evoking memory and emotion which at times are also awesome in their affective power, delivers constant ever changing inspiration for the mind and soul.

My photographs of 'this sceptred isle' are humble attempts to convey and catalyse that power. See the results at my portfolio site.