In The Sound of Space Breathing [Verse III, no. 11], Nicholas Hughes distils a seven‑year ritual of walking Cornish footpaths into a single, meditative image that feels less like a landscape and more like a state of consciousness.

Structured as part of a “Verse” within an ongoing photographic poem on our fragile relationship with nature, the work arises from repeated return to the same terrain, allowing perception to shift from description to immersion, until the artist, by his own account, “become[s] a part of it”. The result is a photograph that enfolds environmental reflection, Romantic reverie and slow, attentive looking, inviting the viewer to consider how a damaged ecology might still offer moments of grace and repair.

The work carries a universal, almost musical rhythm: Hughes structures The Sound of Space Breathing in “verses”, aligning the cadence of his steps with the pacing of images, so that each work feels like a stanza within a larger hymn to slowness and attention.

In this photograph, the subdued palette of silvery greys and deep blacks, characteristic of the series, transforms branches, vapour or water into nearly abstract notation—visual equivalents of breath, pause and hush—that register as much through felt duration as through recognisable motif.

Seen within the arc of Hughes’ oeuvre, which curators have noted for combining “the ethereal with the ecological, and the earthly with the epic”, the photograph participates in a consistent enquiry into how observation and action may join in one contemplative practice.