Sometimes travel has a way of confounding expectations, jolting us into another plane and widening our perspective on the mundane.

Whilst visiting All Saints, Alrewas in Staffordshire, I walked through the lychgate and something in my subconscious latched onto a detail on the ancient buff-coloured tower. It didn't resolve itself until I stood opposite four watering cans, seemingly hung in suspension before me.

There was something about their rounded bodies and curved spouts that suggested planets and their orbits, caught in a cosmic dance. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. My mind wandered from blackbirds baked in a pie to Catherine wheels and the Milky Way - a jumble of unrelated images that somehow felt connected. There was a sense of order beyond the simple act of someone hanging them there - as though greater forces were at play.

I thought of gravity, of quantum entanglement, of the mysterious relationships between things. It was an incomplete thought, more a feeling than an understanding, but I wondered whether I was glimpsing something of the patterns nested within the universe, repeating themselves in countless ways, even in the most mundane arrangements of everyday life. Something immense and unknowable, somehow contained within four watering cans hanging against an ancient wall.

As I stood and looked and pondered, I sensed a door opening somewhere in my imagination - perhaps an insight into things beyond my ken, reached through the felt sense.

This was one of the easiest compositions I've taken. There was nothing to do but convey what was there and leave the rest to the viewer's imagination.

Does a photograph become a portal to other places, notions, ideas and feelings? Have I made a portal out of a portal?

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