Portals, thresholds, gateways, megalithic totems pepper the landscape of Penwith with significant shapes and forms whose meaning is lost. ‘Untethered’ conjures them in time and space and trace on 35mm film. The work was made in Penwith Peninsula, a small finger of land at the far south western edge of Cornwall, England where the light from the open skies dances like fireflies on the Atlantic, as it has for millennia. I have lived in this place, magic land as I called it. It is my spiritual homeland, and I have been returning regularly since I left in 2007, making work there, trying to make sense of my deep connection to the landscape and its ancient roots. Penwith granite formed some 275 million years ago, shape shifting over millennia to reveal the bracken and gorse strewn moorlands of today; no doubt destined for more transformation in the millennia ahead. 22 kilometers and its widest, 6.5 kilometers at its narrowest, 143 square kilometers packed with thousands of prehistoric monuments considered to be one of the highest concentrations in Western Europe. The earliest structures, the quoits or cromlechs, [images 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11 13], date back to c.4000 BC, at a time of transition from hunter gatherer to more settled communities. They are now mostly upturned and in ruins having been plundered for building material, variously blown up or dug up by early archaeologists of the 18th & 19th century. Today they stand ripped from all cultural context, any artifacts that may have been clues to their meaning lost in the acidic soils of Penwith. Of undoubted ritual significance, boundary markers, gathering places, navigation aids, thin places of transition for communing with ancestors and the gods. All of these things and more; nothing known for sure. But still they resonate and fascinate, their energy palpable, their original placement carefully, strategically, aligned with the shifting of the moon, sun and stars, ley lines and natural landscape features. When there’s a gorse fire out come the archaeologists to map prehistoric field systems, round houses, enclosures long lost from view. All those lives that were lived and linked, ancestral knowledge lost but still felt in the wind, and the way that time seems to stop when you step into their orbit. At Zennor Quoit [images 11 & 14], which I climbed up to following a small path through the bracken on a hot October day, when the air was still and the sun warm, I ‘lost’ 6 or more hours making work there, in a fugue state. But in the moonlight, it would be something else entirely. We cannot fully know what acts of ceremony, worship, sacrifice took place within their orbit; we live at the edge of scientific knowledge today only; but there is more in the realm of experience, of connecting with place authentically. This work is an act of ancient imagination, stretching back through time to a form of unfiltered connection rooted in harmony with the landscape of the tors and hills, valleys and moorland.