The Bell Jar

All images by Jo Sinclair

As the heatwave continues the high summer sun illuminates organisms previously unnoticed. A lucid quality of light, and the fact that the vegetation has reached such a height means I am seeing life forms at my fingertips rather than looking towards the horizon. The architecture and engineering detail within the verdant sprawl seems magnified. I notice snails, feathers, seed heads and spider webs, a beetle shedding its skin.

Parachutes are suspended in the globular seed-clocks of goatsbeard. Evening sun streams gold through ripening barley. A grass spider waits in the bell-jar it has constructed. Its web binds the plant it's tethered to as tightly as a trussed-up prey.

Snails lodge vertically on tree-trunks, tucked in against nodules and burrs.

All images by Jo Sinclair