NOTEBOOK SPOTLIGHT: The Rise of Summer commission
Commissioned by the Bishop of Bristol’s Office for the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull and her husband Dr Michael Duddridge, on the occasion of Bishop Viv’s retirement in August 2025.
The Rise of Summer is a photographic landscape panorama, depicting composite elements of the Bishop of Bristol’s garden at Church Lane in Winterbourne.
The striking use of the slash, marking time across the image, reveals the intersection of two primary photographs of the garden: the first was taken on Ascension Day, 29th May 2025, and the second was taken 40 days later. Between these two days, the summer equinox fell on Saturday 21st June.
At its highest point of the year over the Bishop’s House, the sun rises to 62º elevation above the horizon. Correspondingly, the slash is angled to the same degree, with the suggestion of an apex in the centre of the image. Time is marked with the measure of hours of sunlight during each week preceding and following the equinox. It was a hot summer, and the wider, yellowing stripes of grass reveal the changing envelope of weather and temperature.
The garden centres on the orchard, planted and tended by Michael and Josh, the gardener, who introduced fruit trees including the Winterbourne apple, Judas trees, cherries, and damsons around the existing pears and apples. The backdrop of tree canopies include yew, sycamore, ash, oak, and, at either end, the paired old sweet chestnuts. This beautiful space is a kaleidoscope of changing, shifting growth, within the concentrated yet widening frame of care and attention.
Two visible markers of this care and attention are the beehive and the rake, held in both the shade of the sweet chestnuts and in the extended frame of the house, whose outlines interlace the composition. A full 180º behind the viewpoint of the orchard, these house lines represent the private seclusion of home, its borders rich with sweet pea, rose, and crocosmia – their purple hues hinting at the Bishop’s ministry outwards into the garden.
It is a third, off-centre figure who draws the outside play of the scene into symbolic focus: Josh is pictured mowing the wildflower meadow. He is a Christ figure, appearing in the garden as one whose planting, turning, and cutting back is only and always beholden to new life and its miraculous abundance.
Header image: The Rise of Summer, 2025, by Sheona Beaumont.
