I’m fascinated by how powerful and poignant ancient signatures in the landscape remain today - despite the fact that modern construction, climate change and farming practises have radically altered the terrain on which they were originally etched - and by the ways in which later accretions over-layering them often echo their original forms and centres of gravity.
Practise
The research and reconnaissance leading to a successful capture may take months or years. I scour maps, archaeological monographs and out-of-print books for pointers until something promising emerges. Once identified, I’ll travel to the site at different times of day and night, in different light and weather conditions, to experience its atmosphere as fully as possible, in order to try to deduce why the people who created it chose that particular location and what made it special to them.
Being there at first light can intensify emotional engagement with a place. Many prehistoric ceremonial sites exist at a kind of threshold - on the margins of life and death, where elements or different realms merge - and expressing this liminality is always a goal in my composition.
Sacred Geography
Although the landscapes in which they exist may superficially have changed, their essential qualities are probably no different now to how they were thousands of years ago. It is my belief that by experiencing these ancestral creations, we are drawn into a deeper, more fully realized relationship with the landscape and wider cosmos.
Moreover, visiting sites associated with prehistoric ceremony and ritual frequently reveals to us hidden sacred geographies. Properties of the landscape - particularly topographical features and rivers - were exploited by our ancestors to inspire feelings of awe and transcendence. I’m always looking for evidence of this in my own travels, and seek to make such connections - between place and setting - manifest in my photographs.
By de-coding an archaeological site in this way, one can not only gain a sense of what mattered to the people who created it, but also discover whole elements in the surrounding landscape that may have become invisible. In this way, it is possible to re-constitute lost mental maps by means of which our ancestors construed their world, and foster a richer sense of place and belonging in the present.
I’m a Welsh photographer and writer, based on the border of Somerset and Wiltshire, who creates images of prehistoric sites and their landscapes, shot from above (using drones). Painterly in tone and tending towards abstraction, my work explores notions of liminality, the sublime and sense of place. I also perform multi-media shows, weaving together spoken word with photographs of museum artefacts, fragments of folklore, biography and sometimes music and dance, to inspire new visions of the British landscape and the people who inhabited it in the distant past.