ELEMENTAL

Everything people build is theirs on loan. Then water, wind, roots and light come and take it back, patiently, without haste, without intent. ELEMENTAL is a series about that cycle and about the beauty it brings out.

We like to imagine decay as destruction, as the opposite of building. These photographs say something else. Creepers frame the windows as though they had been planted for the purpose. Moss turns hard floors into soft country. Trees grow where ceilings used to be, and their green takes over from the colour that has fallen off the walls. Nature does not destroy, it shapes. It works with growth and decay the way a painter works with light and shadow, and the result is often finer than what stood there before.

This work goes at the pace of the seasons. A year for the first blade of grass in the joint, ten for the shrub, fifty for the tree that lifts the roof. Return to these places over the years and you watch a work take shape that will never be finished and needs no one to look at it.

In these rooms you feel how short the time is in which we hold on to anything. That is not a sad thought. It relieves what we build of having to last for ever, and gives it a second purpose instead, as ground for something new.

These places speak less of the past than of a future in which the earth keeps the last word. ELEMENTAL shows the moment when the wild grows over the ordered and a third thing comes of it, one that nobody planned and nobody could have planned.