The Devil and Saint Dunstan
These pinhole images, from homemade cameras, document folklore, a story which never occurred, an intangible narrative. A document of the collective imagination created with a nonexistent lens. Using a pinhole, rather than a lens, to translate the three dimensions of physical space onto the two dimensions of paper creates a different kind of image. Nothing is in or out of focus, there is a depth, a sense of being from the film on which the image fell without the intervention of glass. The images feel honest and yet simultaneously as intangible as the story they seek to tell. The series invites the viewer to consider the landscape we inhabit, how our ancestors have used it, explained it and lived within it, how we unrecognisably do the same and to imagine how our descendants will reinvent, reinterpret and re-explain. "The Devil came to Sussex, and, angered by the building of so many churches he determined to build a channel from the sea to the weald in order to flood the churches and drown the good people of the county. Commencing his work near Poynings he dug throughout the night throwing clods of earth through the dark sky which, on landing, altered the landscape forever. Creating where they fell the landmarks known today as Cissbury Ring, Chanctonbury Ring, Rackham Hill, Mount Caburn and High Down. Within the city of Brighton and Hove lays the Gold Stone, in Goldstone valley, on which he stubbed his toe before kicking it into the valley. The prayers of St Dunstan, however, woke a cockerel in Poynings which filled his lungs, and crowed loudly, fooling the devil into believing the sun was soon to rise. In anger he threw one last clod to the west, where it fell in the sea, forming the Isle of white before leaping out of the county to neighbouring Surrey. Crashing to the ground his impact formed the Devil's punchbowl but by then St Dunstan and a cockerel had saved the churches and people of the Sussex weald."
