Small Worlds begins with surfaces most people never notice: a patch of rust on discarded industrial metal, mineral stains bleeding through weathered stone, lichen spreading across a boulder, the cracked bark of a fallen branch. Each area is only a few centimetres across, yet photographed in close detail and framed as a circle against darkness, it becomes something else entirely, a distant planet, a moon, a world seen from space.

The work grows from the same ground as Hidden Landscapes: the former colliery sites of North East England, where industry and nature have left their marks side by side. Here, iron bleeds orange from old remnants, minerals bloom in unexpected blues, and lichens slowly colonise bare stone. These are the traces of human activity and natural processes working together over time, and they hold a quiet, unexpected beauty.

By shifting the scale, the images ask us to look differently. What seems like waste or decay becomes rich in colour, pattern and texture. The circular frame recalls both the lens and the telescope, collapsing the distance between the intimate and the infinite, the ground beneath our feet and the worlds beyond our reach.

For generations, these landscapes were valued for what lay beneath them. Small Worlds turns attention to their surfaces, finding wonder in what remains and in the slow, ongoing transformations that most of us pass by.