The American photographer Eliot Porter wrote of the slow, quiet, processes that pass almost unnoticed from season to season. His photographs of a woodland floor in winter inspired me to look more closely at what was around and under my feet.

The natural landscape of forest, mountain or moor begins in or on the ground. These slow, quiet, processes underlie and support all that we simplistically describe as landscape - and this realisation caused me to think seriously about what I was trying to achieve with my camera. I began to spend more time looking down than up, drawn to the granular detail and patterns evident at macro or close-up level rather than the broader landscape.

Eliot Furness Porter (December 6, 1901 – November 2, 1990) was an American photographer best known for his colour photographs of nature.

By the end of November most plants and trees have completed their autumnal senescence. The ground is covered in dead and decaying leaves; the hedgerows and margins populated by the skeletal remains of flowering plants and the desiccated husks of seed heads.

My objective with Husk has been to take the tiny autumn discards and by photographing them in a particular way reveal their structural beauty and elevate them from invisible to interesting. To present the viewer with a complexity that one would normally associate with a piece of sculpture, or jewellery. But unlike a Fabergé egg or a Giacometti figure, whilst the material itself is worthless the forms can be extraordinary.

In botany, a husk (or hull) is the outer shell or coating of a seed. The other botanical term for a seed casing is Calyx, from the Latin calix which itself comes from the Ancient Greek κάλυξ (kálux) meaning "husk" or "pod".

Husk can also refer to the exuvia of insects or other small animals left behind after moulting.

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An image sequence about mortality, material decay, and a kind of second death as identity dissolves.

What started out as a casual afternoon photographing decrepit, lichen covered, grave stones in a medieval Welsh church yard turned into something more interesting when I looked at the images later. I realised that there was an interplay between the complexity of the living lichens, which in themselves are a complex ecosystems of microorganisms, including fungi and bacteria; the erosion of the natural stone through weathering and absorption by the lichen; and the consequential fragmentation of the inscription.

Inextant has also been used to describe languages or texts that remain only as fragments, which seemed an appropriate title for this little project.

The British Lichen Society has an interesting section on church yard lichens which can be found here.

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