THE NUMINOUS ORDINARY  -  2024

​

 

There is a specific phenomenon amongst the natural world that I never quite knew how to put into words, and still wouldn’t, had I not come across an essay titled “The Numinous Ordinary” by naturalist and writer Helen McDonald.

 

- Things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is, that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time… When they occur, and they do not occur often, these moments open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to comprehend. -

 

Light hitting a rockpool in a certain way, at a certain time of day, rendering it liquid gold - I tried countless times to see this again and never succeeded. A tiny blossom momentarily suspended in the air by a single web, dancing.

 

Fleeting and extraordinary moments that, if you aren’t paying attention, can pass by so easily un-noticed.

 

How many millions of these moments go unseen by human eyes?

 

I wanted this body of work to emphasise the importance of paying attention to the natural world - something that is of uncalculable benefit to both human and nature alike. We humans have caused so much damage and it is through this intimacy of paying attention that we can find the pathway to repair.

As Helen McDonald says in the intro to her novel;

“It is one thing to show the statistical facts about species decline…it is another thing to communicate what that loss means…we need to communicate the value of things, so more of us might fight to save them.”

 

Considering this phenomenon can be quite rare to come across, and on many occasions of coming across such moments I have not had a camera on me, some of the photographs in this series are replications of such moments created to accentuate this concept.

 

I hope they will inspire you to explore the art and intimacy of paying attention.