The sacred is an idea, a belief, a need for something higher than human experience; it is a manifestation of humankind’s inner angst about the life/death cycle; the need for connection and meaning. Pitched in opposition is the profane, secular, ordinary, down to earth; we cannot have one without the other. “The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air.” Heidegger. The natural world has been a source of the sacred since humans first walked the earth. Cave paintings, rock shrines, totems, temples, The Parthenon, Stonehenge, Henry Moore’s sculptures, Minor White’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping and so much more. All have been the evocation of a higher realm, enshrined in art and architecture, culture and collective memory. I let these images sit, resonate; I ask for the audience to pay attention. They pitch primal encounters in a tidal space, the ebb and flux of natural forces, rock forms rooted in deep time, against the man-made smash and grab of a granite quarry, where geological time is shattered in a blast of dynamite for the processes of extraction and exploitation. This is my sacred space, a place I know and love, washed daily by the tides, a physic space inaccessible except on certain lunar days. An image can conjure up the landscape of the sacred, beyond words, beyond science, beyond reason. Abstraction and metaphor are tools I like to use to touch upon the tension between representation and the imagination that the photograph lends itself to so well. In an increasingly secular world, where ‘the sacred’ has become commoditised through the prism of the cult of ‘self’; and the natural world is more spectacle, objectified and ‘over there’, to be had in an instant; this work is a love song to the power of a deeper connection with the earth that is encoded in us, but is in danger of being obscured.