There are some places that confound the idea of a continuous present.

St. Michael and All Angels, Gwernesney in Monmouthshire, is one of those places. Here, it felt like the present and past were bleeding into each other.

I’ve often wondered if these wuthering networks of light might hold the sparks that morph the past into our living present.

Yet, time and time again, although I’ve been energised by a felt sense of history, I've been confounded by the mechanics of it all.

It would take an eternity to know this building's every part: the intentional and the accidental, the constructs and the patterns, the hidden lives and meanings, the glyphs, the daily inhaling of light, the creaking presence of the seasons.

On this day, in this holy place, it wasn’t a reliquary that showed me the way, but a recollection from the words of Photographer Edwin Smith, who likened his camera to “a divining rod finding its own peculiar water.”

With so much to take in, I tasked myself to working within Edwin’s creed. I stood in front of the altar, and performed the camera lucida; a creative ritual, a mystical modus operandi: the cleaving of tripod legs, the clench of camera to the head, and the whir of the dials until the final incantation: the pressing of the eye to the camera.

The viewfinder is the most important part of the camera. Embracing the eye with the cup and cosseting the view triggers a transformation. It’s as if the private and prolonged act of looking disconnects the soul from the body, and allows it to hover around the space.

This time, I found myself hovering above a humble screen, a parclose of sorts, surrounding the font.

It had taken six hundred years for this simple screen to come to this point, but it took just an hour with my camera-eye, to help release the voices of the past trapped in the medieval framing like flies in amber.

The life behind the hinge at Gwernesney...

Link to: Unhinged

St. Michael and All Angels, Gwernesney, Monmouthsire.

St. Michael and All Angels is under the care of The Friends of Friendless Churches. You can help save places like this by supporting them as a volunteer or member. See here for more details.

St. Michael and All Angels, Gwernesney, Monmouthsire.

St. Michael and All Angels is under the care of The Friends of Friendless Churches. You can help save places like this by supporting them as a volunteer or member. See here for more details.

Andy Marshall

is an architectural and interiors photographer based in the UK.

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