In The Dreamtime

Description

‘Orkney has woven a spell on me… The simmer dim, the perpetual twilight of midsummer in the Northern Isles is like a dreamtime, that place between sleeping and waking where lines are blurred for all things become clear.

But I sense something else too – faerie magic. The echoes of mythical creatures from Orkney’s ancient stories are all around me and I want to express this somehow, but do not know where to begin. Then it dawns on me that the answer lies with the flowers; that in their secret hidden realm in the wild places amongst the cotton grass and heather, the buttercups, sorrel and ragged robin, I would find what I was looking for.

I need to work on a scale so small that I have to be at eye level to the flowers and enter their domain through a tiny portal – the viewfinder of my camera…

I search, shifting focus millimetre by millimetre, absorbed in a miniature universe so obscured by the open sweep of Orkney’s landscape that it is know only to insects and, yes, faeries. What am I looking for? I really don’t know, except that I will know it when I see it, the unseen landscape that holds its secrets close. Some days I return empty-handed – the faeries will not tell- but some days I am granted a glimpse into their world, a privilege that is only given to those with eyes to see’.