• I take my camera along to most places I visit. These can often be quiet locations, or deserted places; momentarily empty rooms, sites which have been left to decay for decades, or ruins from over a thousand years ago. In encountering ruins and deserted places, we imagine the past and lives led in times other than our own, re-visiting instances in time we can never return to but only imagine.

    Sunlight which finds its way in from outside constantly affects these deserted places. A small window allows a beam of bright sunlight in to break the dark shadowy interior space, bringing to mind the pinhole camera.

    Despite essentially being little more than a box with a small hole in, the camera allows us to capture the world outside, to condense a constantly shifting and changing three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional still images. But photographs are abstractions.

    In the process of flattening which occurs when a photograph is taken, space becomes orientated around the single ‘eye’ of the camera - in reality our two eyes see reality and space in a far more complex way. In viewing an image, we are both within and outside of its contained reality, conceptually in the time and place when the image was taken, yet seeing that past moment through layers of distance. As with the ruin, in encountering the photograph, we also re-visit past instances in time we can perhaps never really know – or which never really existed as we imagine at all.

    Many of these photographs are taken in Shetland. Here, there are still areas of wilderness-landscape which feel ancient, and are not extensively cut through by access roads or paths. It’s easy for the mind to wander and imagine the silhouettes of the wild hills have not changed in thousands of years. In this way, the layered-ness of time can be felt in Shetland. Geological landscapes and natural wildlife are so visible and present, and small townships and houses still seem scattered - the wild places have not yet been boxed in. To explore the landscape here is to move through time and space simultaneously, sensing many aspects of time unfolding on one and the same plane; cliffs slowly weather, as seabirds migrate, as deserted croft-houses become ruins.

    In photographing this place, I capture only small aspects of the landscape. The photograph, expressive of a kind of linear time where still, contained moments occur one after the other, cannot however altogether express this enthralling landscape’s more layered or cyclical time where we can sense the minute and the large, the past and the present, constantly unfolding in parallel.