These photographs were made on a single late morning in summer, in woods I know well, when strong direct sunlight was breaking through the canopy onto the trunks of trees that have stood for decades, in some cases longer. The bark is old and fixed. The shadows on it were not. Each one lasted as long as the light held that particular gap in the leaves above, which in most cases was a matter of seconds or minutes.

I was drawn to the way these shadows stopped reading as leaves and branches and started reading as marks in their own right, shapes with no obvious source once you look only at the trunk. The tree becomes a surface something is briefly written on. The photograph is the only record of that writing, since by the time anyone else stands where I stood, the light will have moved and the mark will be gone.

I treated the images with raised contrast and reduced colour, partly to push attention onto the shape of the shadow rather than the colour of the bark, and partly because it seemed right that a picture about something temporary should look a little stripped back, without much decoration.

I am not trying to say anything definitive about time or memory here. I am pointing at something I noticed and found hard to stop looking at, a permanent thing being marked, for a short while, by something that leaves no trace at all once it has gone.