
A Year in the Life: 25 April 2022
I feel exposed. I want to be in the thick of wattle and daub and hand made clay brick.
A Year in the life of an architectural photographer in his time-travelling camper van.
I feel exposed. I want to be in the thick of wattle and daub and hand made clay brick.
Laithe, henge and church. I can’t help but think that these standing stones are of equal measure.
Somebody has made noble the mundane brick and jammed its magic into artifice. Beyond the styling, the bricks are defined by their texture and hue.
We sit beside the porch and take in the churchyard. Whilst we rest, billows of dust plume out of the porch entrance. The dust-busters are in.
I’m there first thing and I feel anxious - there’s an overwhelming sense of inertia. I walk out into the churchyard to gather my thoughts and catch a dash of red text on a gravestone silhouetted against the rising tide at Y Foryd.
The early morning light is dancing around the stone carvings. It’s the foliate sculpture that renders this space a marvel of the Gothic genre.
I notice the ridge finial detail - it curves downwards and cups the gable - it reminds me of Sir Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral. The covered entrance at Coventry echoes the protective curve of the barn finial.
The landscape here is storied with several thousand years of human interaction. Its narrative unfolds from a single visual perspective and can, on occasion, jolt the senses from one extreme to another.
On winter days like this the gateways throw their light out like a net and those that are caught are subject to fanciful thoughts.
Because I work from a camper van, I’m used to the odd flannel wash, and there has been occasions where I’ve missed that procedure all together...
Deeply troubled by world events, I set about basic tasks in the hope that, out of this simple act, I might find something that offers up the best of humanity.
As I walk along the paving, I can hear their bikes whining. Then there’s a shout behind me, but before I get a chance to turn around, I’m subject to an act of simultaneous aggression.