The stuff of the natural world has an elemental glory. In this series I pored over granular details in my own photographs of Kenyan earth, continental clouds, sunshine, and Venetian tidal water. I also collected photographs from friends who had been to the Namibian and Egyptian deserts, to South American rainforests, and others who had traversed Antarctica, or sought city skylines at nightfall, for Six Days of Uncreation. I was looking for something sensory and illuminating, something that could expose the metaphysical. And I was questioning the act of looking itself: aiming not only only to bring photography up close and personal, but towards ‘the making formal of epiphany’ (George Steiner).

As I began my PhD at the University of Gloucestershire’s International Centre for Biblical Interpretation, I found a poetic language for this approach in Judaeo-Christian ideas, particularly those in the Old Testament. Hebraic concepts of the land are full of grounded metaphors, and in turn my photographs sought to mirror the literature’s visual poetry. Full of tilts, reflections, and inversions, the series plays with pattern to the point of abstraction, while yet making revelation real and physical. In a video piece, Signal, and in my first experiments with lenticular photography, this more deliberate physicality also underlined the viewer’s situation, emphasising a more involved and relational act of looking.