The camera slips from place to place, fuzzy yet alert. He tells me, afterwards, that the photographs were taken over three or four days. I knew that it was days, not hours. But it could have been months. In this series of images, taken over the course of two summers in Leighton Buzzard at Camp Trans, time neither passes nor stills; it pauses just long enough for outlines and surfaces to thicken, like butter creamed with sugar.

Greyscale, a thick tree forks in two. More branches sprout from the trunk, slimmer, more pliant: legs, at a jaunty angle. Shoes hummock at the base. Gigantic, entwined roots are companionable and climbable. The image has a freeing effect. I feel lighter. Being at home with nature appears desirable, but the promise is fraught for viewers familiar with Western art, where ‘the pastoral’ implies a paradise lost.

Words like ‘filament’ and ‘filial’ come to mind as I contemplate the limbs, all the limbs, the branches, and the shining phantom-people. I think of how Francis Ponge describes vegetation as rooted in his poem ‘Faune et Flore’ (1942): he sees trees expressing themselves by means of gesture and proliferation, because they cannot pick up and move. This is not the case here. The trees are animate, ready to play. A quick and birdlike glee is somewhere in the past, present, future of each image. A clamber, a lift, a jump, a lean, a roll – enjoyed, imagined; not ‘captured’.