Vortex Over Wave: Photography meets art meets poetry

It all began in 2021 when I saw an elastic band on the ground and to me it looked like a treble clef. I photographed it, gave it the title 'Variation on a Treble Clef in Shadow', and posted it on social media. Later that year on one of my daily walks I saw a shoelace that looked like an elephant hawk moth caterpillar, and then a little further down the road an elastic band resembling the mirror image of a six which I called 'Not a Roll of the Die'.

I then seemed to notice elastic bands quite often whilst out on walks, and I loved the way my snapshots could turn them into something more than discarded rubber bands. The challenge I set myself was to create the title for each photograph in the time it took to capture the image and edit it to a square photo on my phone.

I loved finding the bands in places where they would not be expected, such as The Great Orme and Loggerheads Country Park.

A couple of friends started to notice my elastic band photos and commented on them positively. One friend took a trip to Australia to see her daughters and sent me a photograph of a purple elastic band, which became 'In a Puddle by the Laundry Shed in the Garden'. The connection across the miles was wonderful and the colour in these photos contrasted well with the greyer images I was photographing in Wales.

In the same way as finding the detail in the little things by tweeting something I noticed on the way to work each morning during lockdown, these photographs gave me a focus for finding something unique within an ordinary moment in time. There is a marking of time within them that is matched by the poems written for each full moon of 2022. I love the fact that these photographs and poems have now been set down in a book.