Trinity College Bristol is home to 200 staff and students, most of them training for ordination in the Church of England. During a year there as artist-in-residence, I found myself drawn to its history – my parents had met there in 1977 – and the Jacobean Stoke House unveiled its many former lives through a series of interventions with people and place, including a Turner watercolour and a studio photographer’s album from 1930. The culmination of the residency was Canopy Compass Rose, a ceiling light-box installation for the refurbished chapel. In its central arrangement and garden location (a one-time orangery), the worship space evokes a vertical orientation towards natural growth and rootedness.

Within the community, I instigated a camera club, partly by inviting representatives from various college groups (such as the part-time students and the nursery children), and partly through leaving disposable cameras in central locations for anyone to use. Capturing the idiosyncrasies and banality of college life, the resulting 500 images formed the material from which Kingdom Series emerged: glimpses of New Testament expression of the ‘kingdom of God’ aligned with a corporeal picturing of lecture-room viewpoints, eating together and a child’s perspective.

Eye See Trinity is the published catalogue of the residency.