Ripple light.

I love light on water. The ripple of the world that it creates - not so much a camera obscura as a wobble in the texture of reality. You look down at the image of the world around and see that it is held together so slightly, see how it can bend and waiver and distort in unthought-of ways: towers bend, bridges break and lights play with perspective like mischievous sprites. Spots become streaks, the secure is torn apart by a change in the current, the spiritual and the secular merge for a moment.

This is a world stripped of certainty. A world where rigid structures are collaged by movement into fragments of this and that, and new pathways and shortcuts are revealed. It is also a nether world, the world inverted, yet holding up a mirror to ourselves and what surrounds us - a mirror that forces is to look again and see what it was we thought we knew. 

If light on the water draws me in moth-like - holding me in fascination, it is because it revels in life's complexity, in the difficulty and hypocrisy of what we think we know. The water likes to show us cracks and distortions, to make is remember that what lies beneath the appearance is more nuanced, that architecture feeds upon itself, that all nature is interconnected, that thought and actions balance on the point of history, wobbling between nods to the past, and anxious glances into the future - that the point itself is planted in shifting ground where nature, geography and urban development all collide. Here we see the rift where class, gender, race and the individual experience all collapse upon each other. 

And this complexity is surely the point, for our attempts to understand need an openness to individuals and to the forces that create, sustain and destroy them. We are products of circumstances and the choices we make within them. This is an axis that requires more than knee jerk morality, or mob judgement; rather we need society to acknowledge situations, contexts and pressures so individuals can accept, adapt and when necessary atone.