Last Spring we were surprised and honoured to host a swoop of house martins that proceeded to build nests at each corner of our house. They dove and wove all summer long with such precision of flight that I nicknamed them the ‘indigo arrows’. Their flight was so fast, but when filmed in slow motion you could not only witness the grace of their flight but their chatter slowed to a song not unlike that of a whale. Before long they had hatched their little ones and we watched in amazement as these tiny creatures were constantly fed and finally fledged to join their parents in aerial acrobatics. Then one gentle September afternoon, they all disappeared without a word of goodbye. They had been such chatty companions throughout the isolated silence of lockdown. It struck me that - bound as we were by the confines of our garden - they had no such earthly boundaries except called by light and length of day to voyage for sub -Saharan Africa and tropical Asia . I so missed their company and long to see them and my family again, perhaps next spring. I wanted to capture the pure joy they gave and thought it appropriate to capture them in cyanotype so they were quite literally bound by light.
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